Birthday Wishes
Mr Charles Darwin Westminster Abbey 20 Deans Yd Westminster London SW1P 3PA UK My Dear Charles (if I may) Happy 209th birthday! I know that a few people have written …
Lives Lived
Ornithologists are people too! When Bob Montgomerie, Jo Wimpenny and I wrote Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin (2014) our aim was to make the history of ornithology interesting, or …
Eats Birds and Leaves
Probably my most memorable feast reflecting the title of this post is an ornithological lunch I had with Tim Birkhead at Restaurant Gilles-Simonet in St Girons in the French Pyrenées …
Books about Books about Birds
Before Google Scholar and similar search engines, most ornithologists that I know trundled off to the library from time to time to search the current literature on birds. As a …
Time Travel
For historians, travel to museums, libraries and historic sites is a way to get in touch with times past and seems, somehow, to improve understanding. I vividly remember the days …
“An Egg Is Always an Adventure”
Birds’ eggs can bring out the worst in people. In the UK, for example, the avaricious collecting of birds’ eggs more than 60 years ago threatened or hastened local extinctions …
2017: A Historic Year for Ornithology
The year that ended yesterday was an historic one for ornithology, with the first meeting of the newly formed American Ornithological Society (AOS) in East Lansing, Michigan. As a student …
Four Calling Birds
As this will be posted on Christmas day, I thought a post about my favourite Christmas song—and my second favourite song about birds [1]—would be in order. I particularly like …
All I Want for Christmas…
If you grew up in the 1950s, as I did, you will know the remainder of that song title as “(is my two front teeth)”, a song recorded by Spike …
Callow Youth
In science, controversies often arise over complex issues when researchers approach a problem from different points of view, backgrounds, and philosophies—think, for example, of the debates over nature vs nurture, …