Ladies, Parakeets, and the Biogeography of an Extinct Bird
In 1850, an anonymous author published a superb diary of natural history observations called ‘Rural Hours by a Lady’ based on two years of exploring the woods and fields near …
Why Woodpeckers are Scarce in the North
On the 18th of June 1858, one hundred and sixty years ago today, Darwin claims [1] to have received that fateful letter from Alfred Russel Wallace—probably the most famous letter …
Audubon’s Legendary Experiments
In his Ornithological Biography [1], John James Audubon describes two experiments that have become legends in the annals of ornithology. Both were ingenious ideas, but Audubon’s conclusions were misleading and …
A Whiskey-Jack by Any Other Name
The year I turned 21, I got my dream job: seasonal naturalist at Algonquin Provincial Park. Algonquin, established in 1893, was only the second provincial park to be created in …
The Spring Rivalry of Birds
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you will have been well aware of the spectacle of mature, powerful males posturing to one …
George Ord’s Warbler
I have always liked the Cape May Warbler. The male in spring is a handsome bird, but scarce enough here in eastern Ontario that I see only one or two …
Lumpers and Splitters
Almost everyone I know who is interested in birds has their favourite group, and the reasons for those favourites vary widely. For some, the difficulty—and their mastery—of field identification is …
The First Textbook of Ornithology?
Despite their association with school courses, and the ready availability of information online, textbooks have long been—and still are—useful for working ornithologists. The OED says that a textbook is : A …
Red Eggs
The cover or frontispiece of almost every book about birds’ eggs is adorned with a picture of a common guillemot (Common Murre [1]) egg. Why? There are several reasons—the common …
Serendipity 101
The more I read about the history of ornithology, the more it strikes me how important serendipity—blind luck—has been to that history. Ernst Mayr’s career, for example, was a long …