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 to you [1] in the 132 years since you shuffled off this mortal coil, but I thought it high time we brought you up to …
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 at least more interesting than is usually the case, by focusing on the lives of ornithologists, with all their foibles, enthusiasms and idiosyncrasies. And what …
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 a few years ago. I had a superb Magret du Canard (the bird) with salad (the leaves) while Tim had the Tartine Pigonneau (pigeon sandwich) …
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 graduate student at McGill, I was lucky enough to have the Blacker-Wood Library close at hand and they subscribed to something like 300 bird journals, …
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 I spent at Down House poring over Darwin’s artifacts, getting a feel for his working conditions, and supposing that somehow this made me a better …
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 of rare raptors and the endangered red-backed shrike Lanius collurio, whose beautifully marked eggs seemed irresistible to collectors. Egg collecting, or öology as it was …
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 of the history of ornithology, I know how hard it is to predict the future of our discipline (i.e. impossible), or to even guess correctly …
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 The Twelve Days of Christmas because the words are secular, it originated in an 18th century memory game, the period celebrated is (or was) all …
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 Jones & His City Slickers that I found really annoying back in the day [1]. Annoying at least until one day, on the way to …
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, selection vs drift, group vs kin vs individual selection, gradualism vs punctuated equilibria, and mechanisms of sexual selection. As Ledyard Stebbins pointed out in 1982, …