Back in the 1980s, one of my graduate students and I split the cost of an Ontario Lottery ticket. We knew that the chances of winning were vanishingly small (p<0.000001) but the jackpot had risen to $24 million—real money in those days. It was a cheap and fun investment that could really help my research …
A few months ago (10 December 2018), I wrote about the first paper ever published about birds (here)—a description of a hummingbird from Barbados, published by the botanist Nehemiah Grew in May 1693. This publication was in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and did not appear until 28 years after scientific publishing began, in 1665. …
CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY Until the 1970s, few women could have called themselves ‘professional’ ornithologists no matter how great their contribution to the study of birds. As I have documented earlier in this series of essays about the history of ornithology, women were most often (i) invisible, in the sense that we …
In 2013, while compiling information for a chapter on the contributions of ornithology to evolutionary biology, I carried on a lively correspondence, by email, with Adam Watson. Watson was a renowned Scottish ecologist, naturalist and conservationist who had worked with Vero Wynne-Edwards, a staunch promoter of evolution by group selection. We have all of Wynne-Edwards …
For at least 400 years, ornithologists—and presumably naturalists of every stripe—have kept notebooks recording each day’s observations from the field. In 17th century England, these were called ‘Commonplace Books’, rather large bound volumes that were used by scholars to record ideas, notes about what they read, experiences and observations. This was the Renaissance, and the …
Four hundred and eight years ago this month—in August 1610—Henry Hudson and his crew of 21 on the tiny ship DISCOVERY entered Hudson’s namesake bay in search of a northwest passage to the orient. As far as we know, Hudson’s 1610-1611 expedition was the first time that Europeans had recorded the sighting of an identifiable …
On the 18th of June 1858, one hundred and sixty years ago today, Darwin claims [1] to have received that fateful letter from Alfred Russel Wallace—probably the most famous letter in the history of science. The original letter was lost but it was transcribed and read to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July …
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 series of fortunate events. No question that Mayr was brilliant, ambitious and creative, but the goddess of fortune was definitely smiling on him. One hundred …