While preparing a talk [1] last week about the early history of ornithology in North America, I wondered who might have been the first to describe and identify a bird on this continent. As far as I can tell, that was Jacques Cartier when he wrote, in 1534, about the ‘Apponat‘ (originally in French but …
Francis Willughby (1635-1672), an English ornithologist, is far from well-known. He died at just 36, so his groundbreaking books on birds, fish and insects were all completed and subsequently published by his life-long friend and one-time undergraduate tutor, John Ray. A brilliant academic and prolific writer, Ray rather eclipsed Francis Willughby. When I wrote The …
Just a week ago the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft (DO-G; German Ornithologists’ Society) celebrated its 150th anniversary at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale) near Leipzig, Germany. The DO-G was actually founded in Leipzig by three men—Johann Friedrich Naumann, August Carl Eduard Baldamus and Eugen Ferdinand von Homeyer—in 1850, so the reason for their 150th anniversary …
When I visited England at the beginning of last month, the English House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) was notable for its scarcity. I spent a week in London, Sheffield and the Peak District and only once heard the familiar and once ubiquitous jib-jib (see recent post) in a small park near St Pancras International in central …
I had no sooner posted last week’s piece about David and Elizabeth Lack in the Pyrenees when there were barn swallows everywhere in the Biros Valley. Until then I had seen no sign of the sort of visible migrations described by the Lacks, possibly because mid-September is a bit too early for that. For the …
How do small land birds migrate past high mountain ranges? This is not a question that has often been asked in the Americas because most of the big mountain ranges run north-south. But in Europe, where the Alps and the Pyrenees would seem to be a formidable barrier to migration (see map below), this issue …
My old friend and mentor Jim Baillie [1] used to delight in the fact that many of the birds we’d see in our birding trips around southern Ontario would say their name: killdeer, curlew, godwit, whip-poor-will, owl, crow, raven, flicker, phoebe, pewee, chickadee, (jay; but see below), veery, pipit, towhee, and bobolink. Jim sometimes gave …
Last Friday, September 1st, was the anniversary of the death of Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon–a species that was, for centuries, the most abundant bird in North America. Martha was probably born in captivity in Charles Otis Whitman‘s aviary in about 1885, and died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. I say probably because there …
This month [see footnote 1] marks the anniversary of the famous 1858 Darwin-Wallace publication on natural selection published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology (PDF here). [Note that it was read at a meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July and published a mere 7 weeks later!] This …
I bought a new pair of binos last week, from the incomparable Pelee Wings Nature Store near Point Pelee (the subject of a recent blog post) in Ontario. This is my 7th pair in more than half a century of watching and studying birds, and maybe the best (Swarovski Pocket CL 8×25); certainly the finest …