Lumpers and Splitters

Almost everyone I know who is interested in birds has their favourite group, and the reasons for those favourites vary widely. For some, the difficulty—and their mastery—of field identification is most appealing: I am thinking peeps, LBJ sparrows, fall wood warblers in North America and leaf (Phyloscopus) warblers in Europe. For others, it’s the beauty of—variously—their …

A Bird’s Eye View

When I started my PhD at McGill University, in 1973, I was thrilled to discover that the university had a library devoted just to ornithology: the Blacker-Wood Library of Zoology and Ornithology. This library was a primarily large room located in the basement of the university’s  immense Redpath Library just down the road from the …