Field Guides

In the fall of 1973, shortly after starting my PhD at McGill University, I decided that I wanted to study a community of hummingbirds in western Mexico. During his own PhD research, my supervisor (major professor), Peter Grant, had discovered an apparent case of character displacement in the bill lengths of two hummingbird species on …

An Eye for Photography

In the summers of 1966 and 1967, I worked (Dream Job #2) for Bill Carrick at the Niska Waterfowl Research Station near Guelph, Ontario. Bill was an outstanding wildlife cinematographer and a superb naturalist who was director/manager of that facility. My job was to raise and feed the myriad birds and mammals that he used …

Magda and Kaethe

CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY In one of my earliest memories—I must have been about 6 years old—it is summer and I am sitting in my grandfather’s garden as his seven hens and a rooster forage around me, almost within touch. I am watching them closely, giving each of them personalities, figuring out …

Not Just a Bird in a Cage

CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY This month—March 2019—is Women’s History Month in the USA, Australia, and the UK [1]. As President Jimmy Carter said in 1980: “Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed” [2]. For a few years now, I have been compiling information on the history of …

In the Shadow of Men

In 1973, I was stranded for several days on a small island in Witless Bay off the southeast coast of Newfoundland. I had gone there several times already that summer, conducting seabird surveys for the Canadian Wildlife Service. Landing on Green Island was sometimes difficult and the days were short as the local cod fishermen—Bill …

The Nice Bird Club

When I took first-year Zoology at the University of Toronto, in the 1960s, our lab instructor/coordinator was Dr J. Murray Speirs. Speirs was a kindly gentleman with a bit of old-world charm, accentuated by his ever-present black beret. I warmed to him immediately because he was also a birder and had a reputation for encouraging …

A Very Queer Little Fish

Twenty years ago when I was writing The Red Canary—the story of how in the 1920s a bird enthusiast and a biology teacher created a red canary—I needed to include an overview of the history of canary domestication. To obtain the necessary information, I started to collect eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books on canary breeding. As …

Holiday Reads

When I first began to take a serious interest in the history of ornithology, about 20 years ago, there were very few books on the topic. In 1975, Stresemann’s Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present was translated into English from the original 1951 German edition. Ernst Mayr added a chapter to that to bring it more …

Birds of the Incunables

For bibliophiles, antiquarian booksellers and librarians, incunables are the crown jewels. These are the earliest books, pamphlets and broadsheets produced during the 60 year period following Johannes Gutenberg‘s development of the printing press in Europe in about 1440. Incunable are all things printed with these new presses until 1 January 1501. And while there are, …

Stresemann’s History of Ornithology

I suspect that rather few birders or ornithologists have heard of, or know much about, Erwin Stresemann. Among his many accomplishments Stresemann wrote the first and most comprehensive history of ornithology, published originally in German in 1951 (Die Entwicklung Der Ornithologie von Aristotles bis zur Gegenwart) and then (thankfully for me) in English in 1974 …