After a seminar last week, my colleague Jannice Friedman, a botanist, asked me if ‘oology’ was really a word, as it had appeared on one of the speaker’s slides. So, she asked, what is the ‘o’ that ‘ology’ (the study of) has been tacked on to? I explained to her that oology (or oölogy) is …
Most of my birder friends don’t do much birding in the summer unless they are involved in breeding bird surveys. Once the flush of spring migration, Global Big Days, and the frenzy of territory establishment have passed, most of them spend the summer months from mid-June to mid-August catching up on their reading, bringing their …
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 guillemot’s egg is an extraordinary shape, it’s brightly coloured, and the variation in the colour and maculation seems almost infinite. Egg collectors, or oölogists as …
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 I attempted to learn some basic Spanish, using a small Berlitz guide. Neil dropped me off just outside town, then headed off to his own …
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 member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The paper “The elimination of the unfit as illustrated by the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus” was written by Professor …
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 …
Yesterday (12 November) marked the anniversary of the discovery, in 1912, of the remains of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The story of that expedition’s side-trip to collect Emperor Penguin eggs is well-known, celebrated in myriad books, articles, documentary films and exhibitions. As is often the case with scientific …