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 …
A Bird’s Eye View
When I started my PhD at McGill University, in 1973, I was thrilled to discover that the university had a library devoted just to ornithology: the Blacker-Wood Library of Zoology …
The Utmost Harmony
I gave my first research talk at a ‘big’ international conference at the AOU meeting at Haverford College (Pennsylvania) in 1976. I talked about my work on Mexican hummingbirds and …
¿Hay Huevos?
I did my PhD field work in Nayarit, Mexico, mainly in the coastal town of San Blas. On our first long drive there from Montreal, my fellow PhD student—Neil Brown—and …
Ornithology, March 1918
Unpublished manuscript dated March 26th, 1918 by Lloyd Kerswill, King City, Ontario [1] It’s nearly the end of March and I have in front of me the first issues for …
The Peculiar Etymologies of Ross’s Birds
When I was first starting to learn about birds, I was particularly intrigued (and delighted) with the peculiar names that had come from old English (dunlin, cormorant) and other languages …
A Century Ago
As you might suspect, I find the history of ornithology in particular—and the history of science in general—pretty interesting. But even I am not sure why. In high school, history …
Professor Bumpus and His Sparrows
Guest Post by Ted Anderson Possibly the most influential ornithological paper published inNorth America in the 19th century was actually written by an invertebrate embryologist who was not even a …
Galápagos Sojourn
26 February 2018 Mr Charles Darwin Westminster Abbey UK My Dear Charles My apologies for not writing last Monday as I had suggested I might when I wrote to you …