Most of the ornithologists that I know have a great sense of humour. My old friend and mentor, James L. Baillie often took me birding when I was a teenager and his typical response when I could not identify a big, distant bird was “You know the crow?”. At first, he was almost always right …
CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY Until the 1970s, few women could have called themselves ‘professional’ ornithologists no matter how great their contribution to the study of birds. As I have documented earlier in this series of essays about the history of ornithology, women were most often (i) invisible, in the sense that we …
The American Ornithological Society is committed to providing professional development opportunities for our members. With that in mind, if you’re a faculty member and are invited to review a paper for The Auk or The Condor, we encourage you to consider involving graduate students you mentor in the peer review process. If you have an advanced graduate student who …
CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY In one of my earliest memories—I must have been about 6 years old—it is summer and I am sitting in my grandfather’s garden as his seven hens and a rooster forage around me, almost within touch. I am watching them closely, giving each of them personalities, figuring out …
CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY A recent study [1] of papers published from 1970 to 1990 in computational population genetics in the journal Theoretical Population Biology found that women were acknowledged for their contributions at a much higher rate than they appeared as authors. During that period only 7% of authors were women whereas …
CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY This month—March 2019—is Women’s History Month in the USA, Australia, and the UK [1]. As President Jimmy Carter said in 1980: “Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed” [2]. For a few years now, I have been compiling information on the history of …
Every year, the American Ornithological Society presents a range of awards honoring members for their stellar contributions to science and their impactful service to the organization. The 2019 recipients will accept their awards at the annual AOS meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, this June. Their work spans the full breadth of avian science, including contributions to …
Color bands, leg flags, and other field-readable marks are a core component of the ornithologist’s toolkit. Mark-resight studies have led to invaluable insights into the demographics, movements, territoriality, and migration patterns of birds. But clear, confident IDs can be hard to obtain in the field. Colors are difficult to distinguish in low light or when worn, alphanumeric codes are easily mis-remembered or mis-recorded, and was it blue on the left, red on the right, or the other way around?
…The Private Life of the Gannets, for Best Short Subject (One Reel). It is 1938, and this film is the first movie about wildlife to win an Academy Award. Julian Huxley was the producer and director, and Ronald Lockley was the writer. A. L. Alexander, the narrator, is listed on IMDB as the ‘star’, though …
Woodpeckers make holes in trees. Don’t they?
