What Is a Species?
Guest Post Karl Schulze-Hagen, Mönchengladbach, Germany The very first paper published in the Journal für Ornithologie, in 1853, was written by the Dresden zoologist Ludwig Reichenbach (1793-1879). That paper {On …
The First Penguins
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 …
Discovering Francis Willughby
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 …
Small Groups of Men
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 …
The Sparrow Question
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 …
Snow in the Mountains
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 …
Grandeur and Novelty
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 …
What’s in a (Bird’s) Name?
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 …
Gone Birds
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 …
Birds and Revolutions
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, …