A Vacation Like No Other

[Note to readers: posting here has been on hiatus for the past couple of months as I have been in the field but also because this site will shut down in the next month or so, as the AOS launches a new website (here). Most, or all, of the current ‘history’ pages on this site will eventually migrate to the History Committee page on the new AOS site. This will be the final blog post in the current series that began here more than two years ago. In future I will contribute occasional posts to the omnibus AOS blog called Wing Beat. Thanks for reading and commenting on the 100 or so posts that have appeared on this site.]

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 27 September 2019

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 program if we won. We spent the next couple of weeks in the field, often chatting about what we might do with the winnings.

We eventually decided that, if we won, we would buy a nice plot of land in the arctic or the tropics, and build a field station. We figured there would be enough money to allow us to employ and fund a dozen or so field biologists to work at the station—people who would be engaging, creative and productive, with the freedom to explore whatever interested them. We did not win that particular lottery but both of us realized our dream by supervising some outstanding graduate students and postdocs in the intervening 30+ years, and working with them in the field.

E. H. Harriman

In 1899, Edward Harriman was faced with an opportunity like our dream of winning that lottery, but he already had the funds to make it happen. Harriman was what we used to call a railroad tycoon, and was one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in the United States. By 1899, when he was 51, Harriman was director of the Union Pacific Railroad and already fabulously wealthy. He achieved that success through incredibly hard work, combined with a keen mind and outstanding business acumen. The hard work, though, had taken its toll on his health, so, in January 1899, his doctor recommended a long vacation.

For Harriman, though, the idea of lying on a beach, visiting European cathedrals, or golfing for a month or two held little interest. But he knew he had to get away from the day-to-day running of his businesses for a while. His first thought was to spend a few weeks hunting Kodiak bears in Alaska, something he had always wanted to do. As often happens with type ‘A’ personalities, though, that simple ‘idea’ soon blossomed into a gargantuan endeavour involving huge expenses, dozens of people, and complex travel arrangements. Just as we had done 80 years later, Harriman thought it would be incredible to gather together some of the best field scientists in America and take them to an interesting place, all expenses paid and no expense spared.

To assemble a coterie of top scientists—geologists, historians, anthropologists, zoologists and botanists—Harriman, in March 1899, asked his friend C. Hart Merriam at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for help. Merriam was a founding member of the AOU (now AOS), the brother of Florence Merriam Bailey (see post here), and one of the top American zoologists of the day. Within three weeks, Merriam had convinced an incredible array of participants to join the Harriman Expedition, due to depart Seattle at the beginning of June. In addition to Merriam, these included ornithologists Robert Ridgway, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Charles Keeler, Leon J. Cole, and Albert K. Fisher, as well as 10 other biologists, 5 geologists/geographers, and a dozen artists and photographers among others. The naturalists/authors John Burroughs, John Muir and George Bird Grinnell added to the sterling cast of explorers. Including his family members, a chaplain, taxidermists, cooks and the ship’s crew, a total of 128 people participated in the expedition.

Some of the expedition members at the abandoned Cape Fox Village, Alaska, in 1899

For transportation, Harriman had a steamship, the SS George W. Elder, retrofitted with luxurious staterooms for the members of the expedition, a stable for animals, studios for taxidermists and artists, and even a library of more than 500 books about Alaska. The expedition left Seattle to much fanfare on 31 May, heading north up the coast of British Columbia to Alaska.

Over the next two months they explored the coasts and islands of Alaska as far north as the Bering Strait where they landed on both the Alaskan and Russian shores. Sometimes expedition parties went ashore to camp, hunt, paint, take photographs and collect specimens. Most stops were short as Harriman relentlessly wanted to press on northward. In all, they travelled 14,500 km (9000 miles) by ship, returning to Seattle on 30 July.

Routes and stop in Alaska. Map by Fuertes

During the course of the expedition, thousands of specimens were collected, a new fjord discovered, 5000 photographs, taken and hundreds of paintings and illustrations produced. Though only 25 years old, Fuertes was already at the peak of his powers as a bird artist and illustrator:

A few of Fuertes’ illustrations from the expedition

On return Harriman funded the production of 14 volumes of scientific observations, well-illustrated with photographs, drawings and colour plates of paintings. The section on birds was written by Charles Keeler and is largely a narrative of what they saw at different stopping points. Though the expedition did not produce anything very interesting from an ornithological perspective, it was not bad, as Harriman himself said: “as a summer cruise for the pleasure and recreation of my family and a few friends”.

SOURCES

• Burroughs J, Muir J, Grinnell GB (1901). Alaska; Narrative, glaciers, natives; Volume I. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company
• Keeler C (1902) Days among Alaska birds,. pp 205 – 234 IN Dall W, Keeler C, Fernow BE, Gannett H, Brewer WH, Merriam CH, Grinnell GB, Washburn ML. History, geography, resources. Harriman Alaska Series, Volume 2. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company
• various authors (1901- ) Harriman Alaska Series, Volumes 1-14. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company
• websites: Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wikipedia, PBS, Cornell University, Smithsonian

Banner year

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 8 July 2019

Last week I showed a banner the role of some prominent women in the history of ornithology. We prepared that large banner to display at the recent AOS conference in Anchorage, but I thought it worth posting here for those of you who were not at that conference or were just too busy to stop and read the details. Almost immediately after I posted it, a couple of friends and colleagues wrote to say something like “Wait, what? You made a banner on the role of women in ornithology where you mentioned pioneers like Brina Kessel but then you did not include her in your timeline!”

The reason for that apparent oversight is that we made a separate banner about Dr Kessel—shown below—in part to highlight her pioneering work studying Alaskan birds. We also wanted to celebrate her incredible bequest to the AOS, one that will provide travel funds, research grants and more to AOS members, in perpetuity. I have written previously about Brina Kessel here and here.

In addition to the Kessel and Women banners, we also made a banner celebrating diversity in ornithology. We have come a long way since ornithological societies were run by and comprised of small groups of white men, and this diversity banner was designed to celebrate how far we have come to embracing the diversity of genders, cultures, races, ages, and experiences in the AOS. That banner, shown immediately below with the other two, is a mosaic of photographs of ornithologists composed into the image of a willow ptarmigan, the state bird of Alaska.

Women in Ornithology

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 2 July 2019

I have been in Alaska for most of the last month, doing field work on St Paul Island (in the Pribilofs), and at Ukpeaġvik (formerly Barrow) on the north slope, then at the terrific AOS conference in Anchorage. At the AOS meeting we presented a couple of large banners celebrating women in particular, and diversity in general, in ornithology. Here is the ‘women in ornithology’ banner for those of you who were not at the conference, or, like me, ran out of time to actually read anything.

Field Guides

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 3 June 2019

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 the Islas Tres Marìas, about 50 km off the Pacific coast at San Blas, Nayarit. Hummingbirds seemed a good choice—both then and now—for a field study as they were abundant, fairly easy to watch, and could be attracted to feeders. Most important for my study, it seemed at least possible to quantify the energetic costs and benefits of their foraging activities and how bill size might influence those costs and benefits.

My initial excitement about this project was seriously dampened when I discovered that what I thought was the only field guide to Mexican birds was the one that Peter had used during his field work in the mid-1960s [1]— Emmet Reid Blake’s Birds of Mexico, first published in 1952. Blake’s guide included some drawings but nothing really as useful as the field guides to North American birds that I was so familiar with. Asking around [2], I learned that two new guides to Mexican birds had been published in 1972—Irby Davis’s Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Central America and Ernest P. Edwards’s A Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico —both with colour plates.

Blake’s Birds of Mexico with two species accounts

I ordered them both but when they arrived I saw that field identification was still going to be tough. One of my focal species—Cinnamon Hummingbird—was distinctive and easy, but the other was the Broad-billed hummingbird which looked to me very similar to a half dozen other species that I expected to encounter. From today’s perspective that now feels like I was being overly cautious but at the time I had only ever seen the Ruby-throated hummingbird and the vast array of tropical species made their identification seem bewildering complex. I learned to watch birds with Peterson’s Eastern Guide and Robbins’s Golden Guide in hand so even those new Mexican guides seemed primitive in comparison.

Edwards’s and Davis’s field guides and a hummingbird plate from each

By early October, I had pretty much decided to study gulls in Newfoundland for my PhD when I had one of those life-defining coincidences. My fellow graduate students and I drove from Montreal to Cape Cod to attend the AOU meeting in Provincetown. I told various people about my research dilemma and most commiserated with the problems of field identification in the tropics. Then, in a break between talks, I went to the vendors’ tables and there was the latest Peterson Field Guide—Peterson and Chalif’s A Field Guide to Mexican Birds. The book had actually been published in January 1973 but there was no internet in those days and we usually only found out about new books when the publisher sent around flyers, or we heard by word of mouth.

Peterson’s Mexico Guide and a plate of hummingbirds

The new Peterson Guide was perfect for me as it put field identification in terms that I was familiar with—great illustrations, arrows indicating key field marks on every bird [3], and brief, clear descriptions. A quick look at the relevant plates told me that I would have no trouble identifying all the hummingbirds I was likely to encounter in western Mexico. The following June (1974), my colleague Neil Brown and I drove from Montreal to San Blas in June 1974 to begin our PhD research—he studying Thryothorus wren songs in the nearby highlands at Tepic, and I working on the foraging ecology of hummingbirds along the coast. With the Peterson guide in hand, we made a discovery on our way south through Sinaloa that showed how a previous study of Neil’s wrens had probably misidentified them, possibly because those wrens had been too hard to positively identify in the field.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that field guides made bird-watching popular, and continue to attract people to the hobby and to professional ornithology. The very first real field guide—small enough to carry, with details on rapid identification—was probably Florence Augusta Merriam‘s Birds Through an Opera-Glass, published in 1889 by The Chautauqua Press [4]. Florence was encouraged by her parents and her aunt to study natural history and both she and her brother (C. Hart Merriam) became prominent ornithologists.

While attending Smith College (1882-1886), Florence began to write articles on bird protection for Audubon Magazine, and founded the Smith College Audubon Society. She was very interested in studying live birds rather than collecting them for museums. As a result, she one of the first people to suggest watching birds through binoculars to study their behaviour, rather than shooting them: “When going to watch birds, provided with opera-glass and note-book, and dressed in inconspicuous colors, proceed to some good birdy place, — the bushy bank of a stream or an old juniper pasture, — and sit down in the undergrowth or against a concealing tree-trunk, with your back to the sun, to look and listen in silence.” [5}

Florence’s guide covered 70 species of land birds common to eastern North America, with a few species illustrated with woodcuts from Baird, Brewster and Ridgway’s History of North American Birds published in 1874. It seems to me that she intended her book to be a guide to bird-watching rather than a guide to identification to be used in the field: “Carry a pocket note-book, and above all, take an opera or field glass with you…watching them closely, comparing them carefully, and writing down, while in the field, all the characteristics of every new bird seen” [6]. That sounds like she is advocating taking notes so that species can be figured out back home, with her book in hand. It would be interesting to know if anyone actually used this book as a field guide back in the day. Some parts of her book would have been useful to the novice trying to identify birds that they encountered—like the drawings and some of the descriptions—but the focus is more on methods and the details of her encounters with each species.

Some birds from Merriam’s guide

She begins, for example, with a short chapter on how to watch birds and figure out which species is which. She suggests using the abundant and familiar American Robin as point of departure for size, colour, songs, habitats and habits: “Begin with the commonest birds, and train your ears and eyes by pigeon-holing every bird you see and every song you hear. Classify roughly at first, — the finer distinctions will easily be made later” [7] She adds three Appendices with suggestions on pigeon-holing species to facilitate identification, on general family characteristics, and on classifying birds with respect 10 different traits that could be observed in the field.

Some of Merriam’s pigeon-holes

Most of Merriam’s book is devoted to those 70 species’ accounts, starting with the American Robin. These are charming, interesting and detailed descriptions of the birds and their habits, based largely on Florence’s own observations in the field. These must be among the first published details of the behaviour and ecology of most of these species, anticipating the sort of life histories that Arthur Cleveland Bent would begin publishing 30 years later. In some cases—like the thrushes—she presents information to allow the observer to distinguish similar species, and for many she includes details of song including notes and mnemonics, as shown below.

White-throated Sparrow songs

We have come through a half dozen revolutions in field guides since Merriam’s day, marked by things like printing all species in colour, Peterson’s field marks method, lifelike paintings showing all plumages, sonograms, and range maps. As I prepare to head off to Alaska for field work next week, I will make sure that my iPhone has the latest Sibley and ebird apps, but I won’t be taking any books. Birders can now go to almost any country in the world with a useful field guide, notebook and camera in their pocket. Florence began her little field guide with “Wherever there are people there are birds…” [8] but now, as a result of the hobby that she promoted, it would be fair to say that wherever there are birds there are people.

SOURCES

• Baird SF, Brewer TM, Ridgway R (1874)  A History of North American Birds: Land Birds, Vols 1-3.. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. 
• Bent AC (1919) Life Histories of North American Diving Birds. U. S. National Museum Bulletin 107.
• Brewster W (“W.B.) (1889) Recent Literature: Birds Through an Opera Glass. The Auk 6: 330
• Brown RN (1979) Structure and evolution of song form in the wrens Thryothorus sinaloa and T. felix. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 5: 111-131
• Grant PR (1965) A systematic study of the terrestrial birds of the Tres Marias Islands, Mexico. Postilla 90:1–106.
• Merriam FA (1890) Birds Through an Opera-Glass. New York: The Chautauqua Press.

Footnotes

1. field work in the 1960s: since Grant was collecting birds, a field guide was not particularly important for most of his research.
2. asking around about field guides: without email, this was a tedious and slow process of letter writing in those days.
3. arrows indicating key field marks: I seem to recall that Peterson patented this method, which is why no other field guides could use it
4. Chautauqua Press: the back of the title page says “This edition of “Birds Through an Opera-Glass” is issued for The Chautauqua Press by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers of the work.”
5. quotation about bird watching: from Merriam 1889: page iv
6. quotation about notebooks: from Merriam 1889: page 3
7. quotation about pigeon-holing: from Merriam 1889: page 1
8. quotation about people and birds: from Merriam 1889: page 1

Bird Paper Two

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 6 May 2019

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. Ornithology did not really become a ‘science’ in England until Ray’s The Ornithology of Francis Willughby was published in English in 1678 [1] but it still took another 15 years before a scientific paper on birds appeared.

Grew also published the second-ever paper about birds when he followed up on his first publication in the July/August 1693 issue of Philosophical Transactions. That second paper is short enough that I can reproduce it here in its entirety:

In that second paper he reports that the observations that he reported on earlier that year were actually made by a Mr Hamersly, and he wonders if the birds really do subsist on nectar, or are actually eating insects on the bottoms of corollas. He must have known that none of the English birds that he would have been familiar with subsisted on nectar alone so it would have seemed anomalous to him that any bird could. He wisely suggests opening up a hummingbird to see if they have different sorts of guts from other birds.

That was a great suggestion—and would have been a revelation—as the stomach of a hummingbird is a specialized structure. At least in the few species whose stomachs have been studied, food enters the hummingbird’s proventriculus (stomach) very close to and on the same plane as where it exits into the duodenum from the ventriculus. Thus the liquid nectar takes a shortcut to the small intestine without passing into the ventriculus. The ventriculus is used to crush insects that the bird eats but really has nothing to offer the nectar. Nutrients are absorbed in the small intestine so the hummingbird digestive systems gets digested nectar to the site of absorption as quickly as possible.

Digestive system of the chicken

Female Broad-tailed Hummingbird at nest

When I was analyzing data for my PhD thesis (on hummingbirds), I lived for a month in a VW camper in the mountains north of Tucson, Arizona. A female Broad-tailed Hummingbird came into our camper regularly to inspect the red plastic plates by the sink. This surprised me because I saw no obvious hummingbird flowers during my frequent walks in the woods. One day, I followed the female back to her nest and often saw her foraging on insects.

We surveyed the woods for 500 m in each of the eight cardinal directions from the nest and found no flowers whatsoever. We also watched the bird during 19 foraging bouts away from the nest and only saw her catching aerial insects and taking prey from spiders’ webs. As far as we were aware at the time (and still), this was the first evidence that hummingbirds could subsist solely on arthropods for a while, and it makes sense, from a nutritional point of view, that they would have to feed animal protein to their nestlings, as otherwise they could not grow.

Hummingbirds continue to be a fascinating group to study but Grew was not the first to publish something about them. That honour goes to the French explorer Jean de Léry who spent 10 months on the coast of Brazil in 1557. de Léry published about his adventures in 1578, with a chapter on the birds he saw, including “une singuliere merveille, et chef-d’oeuvre de petitesse, il n’en faut pas omettre un que les sauvages nomment Gonambuch, de plumage blanchastre et luisant, lequel combien qu’il n’ait pas le corps plus gros qu’un frelon, ou qu’un cerf-volant, triomphe neantmoins de chanter” [2], in other words, a hummingbird.

de Léry’s description could hardly be called ‘scientific’, so the first description of a hummingbird—in fact of 9 species—that is both accurate and scientifically interesting was not published until almost a century later, in 1648. These descriptions appear in Georg Marcgrave‘s section of Historia naturalis Brasiliae. Marcgrave’s original text is in Latin, and was later translated into French and English [3]. I will post a full account of Macgrave’s findings later this year. In the meantime, here is a picture (from Marcgrave) of one of the species he describes:

Guainumbi (hummingbird) in Marcgrave (1648)

SOURCES

• Grew N (1693a) The description of the American tomineius, or hummingbird. Philosophical Transactions 17: 760-761
• Grew N (1693b) A query put by Dr. N. Grew, concerning the food of the Humming Bird; occasioned by the description of it in the transactions. Numb. 200. Philosophical Transactions 17: 815
• Klasing K (1998). Comparative Avian Nutrition. New York: CAB International.
• de Léry J (1578) Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite Amerique. Contenant la navigation, et choses remarquables, veuës sur mer par l’aucteur. Le comportement de Villegagnon en ce pays la. Les mœurs et façons de vivre estranges des Sauvages Ameriquains : avec un colloque de leur langage. Ensemble la description de plusieurs Animaux, Arbres, Herbes, et autres choses singulieres, et du tout inconnues pardeçà: dont on verra les sommaires des chapitres au commencement du livre. Le tout recueilli sur les lieux par Jean de Lery, natif de la Margelle, terre de sainct Sene, au Duché de Bourgongne. La Rochelle ou Genève: Antoine Chuppin. [1611 edition available here]
• de Léry J (1990) History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Translation and introduction by Janet Whatley. Berkeley: University of California Press
• López-Calleja MV, Fernández MJ, Bozinovic F (2003) The integration of energy and nitrogen balance in the hummingbird Sephanoides sephaniodes. Journal of Experimental Biology 206:3349–3359.
• Marcgrave G (1648) Historiae Naturalis Brasiliae, Liber Quintus, Qui agit de Avibus. in Piso et al. (1648)
• Montgomerie RD, Redsell CA (1980) A nesting hummingbird feeding solely on arthropods. Condor 82:463–464.
• Piso W, Hackius F, Laet JD, Marggraf G, Lud. E (1648) Historia naturalis Brasiliaeauspicio et beneficio illustriss. I. Mauriti Com. Nassau illius provinciae et maris summi praefecti adornata: in qua non tantum plantae et animalia, sed et indigenarum morbi, ingenia et mores describuntur et iconibus supra quingentas illustrantur. Leiden: Lugdnum Batavorum, Apud Franciscum Hackium, et Amstelodami apud L. Elzevirium. [available here]
• Ray J (1678) The Ornithology of Francis Willughby. London: John Martyn.

Footnotes

1. published in English in 1678: it was first published in Latin in 1676
2. quotation from de Léry: (1578) which I translate as “But for a singular marvel, and masterpiece of smallness, I must not omit one that the savages call Gonambuch, with whitish and shiny plumage, which has a body no bigger than a hornet, or a beetle, nevertheless triumphs to sing”. Whatley’s (1990) translation of this passage is slightly different but the details are the same.
3. translated into French and English: while I studied both French and latin for 5 years at school, my Latin is rustier from lack of use (!). I have not located the French and English translations in a library or on the web.

IMAGES: chicken digestive system from Wikipedia; Grew paper from Biodiversity heritage Library; Broad-tailed hummingbird photo by Bill Ratcliff from Wikimedia Commons

Aves mexicanus

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 1 May 2019

One of the curious traits shared by birders and professional ornithologists is an abiding interest in bird names, both common and scientific. With respect to common (English) names, I have previously highlighted attempts at standardization in the 1830s (here), one recognizing a woman (here), one that is obscure and obsolete (here), a recent name change (here), and an odd misnomer (here). Since 1850 dozens of books and papers have been published about the English and Latin names of birds (see list here). And a new book by Stephen Moss Mrs Moreau’s Warbler provides some delightful insights into the origins of many odd common names.

The scientific names of birds have attracted less interest, in part, I assume, because those names are regulated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). The ICZN governs the designation of type specimens, the choice of scientific names and the rules of priority.  The code’s Principle of Priority mandates that taxon names (species, genus, family, etc) are always the ones that appeared first in print. All of these taxon names can only change when taxa are lumped or split but the rule still applies to newly designated taxa. Hugh Strickland proposed that first rule in his 1842 report to the British Association that established the ICZN. Thus scientific names are not really open for discussion or change unless a mistake has been made.

Quite a few of the scientific (Latin) species names of birds come from country names. This is largely due to European explorers collecting and describing a species for the first time and naming the species after the country where the first specimen was collected. According to the current IOC World List [1], australis is the most common species epithet that looks like a country name, used for 22 extant bird species in 22 different genera (by necessity) and 10 orders of birds. But australis means ‘southern’, and not ‘Australia’, and only 8 of those species occur in Australia, the rest being found in New Zealand (3), Africa (6), south Pacific (3). south Atlantic (1), and the USA (1).

Thus the most popular country name used for species is americanus/americana with 17 extant species but here again the authors were often referring to the Americas and not specifically to the USA or even North America. I have not checked to see where the type specimens were collected but 4 of those species do not occur in the USA and 2 do not occur in North America.

Species unequivocally named after a country include indicus (17), mexicanus (14), peruvianus/peruanus (12), canadensis (8), sinica/sinensis (7), brasiliensis/brasilianus (6), portoricensis (4), and  colombianus/colombica (3) [2]. Species named after a continent include africanus/africanoides (11) and asiaticus (7). Interestingly, few species were named after European regions where those very explorers came from:  euopaeus (2), germana (1), scotica (1), brit- (0), espan- (0), ital- (0), norv- (0), and sver- (0)..

All of the species named indicus appear to occur in India, but 3 of the species named mexicanus are not really Mexican [3], and two do not even occur in Mexico—the Puerto Rican Tody (Todus mexicanus) being endemic, not surprisingly, to Puerto Rico, and the Oriole Blackbird (Gymnomystax mexicanus) which lives in northern South America.

Birds with species name mexicanus

About a month ago, Tom Sherry (Tulane University) wrote to ask if I knew anything about the history of the species name mexicanus for the Puerto Rican Tody. I didn’t, but his query prompted this post. It has taken me a couple of weeks to explore this question and it has so absorbed me that I had no time to post anything [4] on the past two Mondays as I usually do.

The scientific name of the Puerto Rican Tody dates from 1838 when the bird was described (see below) by René Primevère Lesson in a paper he wrote about some todies new to science. Lesson called the species Le Todier vert, rose et bleue and noted that it was from Puerto Rico (L’île Porto-Rico). His footnote #2 says that this is Todus portoricensis and attributed this name to Adolphe Lesson, his brother (who was a botanist). His footnote #1 refers to the previous species (probably the Jamaican Tody) on that page Le Todier vert et jaune that he calls Todus viridis or Todus mexicanus, also discovered and reported by his brother Adolphe, from Veracruz in Mexico.

First description of Puerto Rican Tody (Lesson 1838)

Now, I am by no means an expert on the rules of nomenclature but it seems to me that it is a mistake to call the Puerto Rican Tody Todus mexicanus, and that Todus portoricensis is both correct and appropriate. Dr Sherry tells me that some birders that he met on his trip to Puerto Rico wondered how the apparently mistaken scientific name came to be. Maybe it is a real mistake and there would be a case to have the scientific name changed. By any name, this is a beautiful little bird.

Puerto Rican Tody (Kevin Loughlin PHOTO)

SOURCES

• Lesson RP (1838) Mémoire descriptif d’espèces ou de genres d’oiseaux nouveaux ou imparfaitement décrits. Annales des Sciences Naturelles 2(9): 166-176
• Moss S (2019) Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. New York: Faber & Faber.

Footnotes

1. IOC World List: I used v 9.1 available here
2. country or continent names: the names listed here include feminine and neutral variants (e.g. both asiaticus and asiatica). I have listed all the names that I could find that had >2 examples.
3. not really Mexican: the Prairie Falcon (Falco mexicanus) breeds and winters in northern Mexico but 9/10 of its range is in the USA
4. no time to post anything: not to mention attending the funerals of two colleagues, marking 48 final term papers in my history and philosophy of biology course, and trying to meet the Canadian income tax deadline

IMAGES: mexicanus species from Handbook of Birds of the World online; excerpt from Lesson’s paper from Biodiversity Heritage Library; Tody photo courtesy Kevin Loughlin (via Tom Sherry)

The Story of O(ology)

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 15 April 2019

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 the study of eggs, and birds’ eggs in particular, but I had no idea why it was not something more logical like ‘ovology’ [1]. Oology is one of those words like ‘popsicle’ and ‘’castle’ that are familiar but then sound ridiculous when you think about them or repeat them too often [2].

W. C. Hewitson

The OED says that oology first appeared in print in English in 1830, in an advertisement [3] for the soon-to-be-published British Oology by William Hewitson. Hewitson published this ‘book’ as a series of fascicles, sold by subscription beginning in 1831 and completed in 1838. The second (1843-44) and third editions (1856) were called Coloured Illustrations of the Eggs of British Birds. Among the subscribers to that first edition were such notables as John James Audubon, John Gould, W. J. Hooker, Sir William Jardine, Prideaux John Selby, and William Yarrell [4]. It was clearly a popular publication on a popular topic.

Hewitson’s British Oology starts with an Introduction in which he waxes poetic about his love of Nature, and the pleasures of egg-collecting: “who does not remember those joyous times when, at the first breaking loose from school, he has hied him to the wood and the hedge-row, in search of his painted prize?”[5] In that first edition, he describes the eggs and nests of 229 species that bred in Britain, illustrated with coloured plates that he drew on lithographic stone and then hand-coloured. Those plates, curiously, show no more than four eggs per page, all life size, and thus the plates are often mostly white space (see below).

Some of the eggs shown in British Oology

Like most pre-Darwinian naturalists, Hewitson saw in the design of eggs some God-given purpose for the good of mankind: “For the same purpose for which they adorn the plumes of the Humming-bird, or the wing of the resplendent butterfly — to gladden our eyes, ‘To minister delight to man, to beautify the earth.’ And thus it is that the eggs of nearly all those birds (the Owl, Kingfisher, Bee-cater, Holler, Nuthatch, and the Woodpeckers) which conceal them in holes, are white, because in such situations colour would be displayed to no purpose.” [5].

Even in the interspecific variation in clutch size, Hewitson saw the hand of God providing for mankind: “In every instance we shall find the same beneficent influence acting for our welfare; increasing rapidly, by the number of their eggs, those species which are of the greatest use to us, and bestowing upon those intended for our more immediate benefit, a most wonderful power of ovo-production; and at the same time curtailing in their numbers those species which, in their greater increase would soon become injurious to us.” [5]

Despite all of that teleology, Hewitson was perceptive in noting that species with precocial offspring have eggs that are larger relative to female size compared to species with altricial hatchlings. He also concludes that egg colour cannot be generally useful for camouflage except in a few ground-nesting birds. With respect to the use of eggs in taxonomy, he has a mixed message but still seems to want to cling to the idea that egg traits will be useful for classification [6]. His descriptions of breeding habitats, nest construction, breeding seasons and clutch sizes provide a useful window on the state of knowledge about British birds almost two centuries ago.

I assume that the word ‘oology’ was already in general use when Hewitson published British Oology because he uses the term without definition or special mention, as if all readers would know what he was talking about. For the next century oology was a prominent topic among people interested in birds, the subject of several books, myriad papers, and even a museum of oology [7] in Santa Barbara, California. Hewitson later turned his attention to collecting and illustrating lepidoptera, but occasionally dabbled in oology, mainly updating his British Oology with papers on new discoveries in the British Isles and continental Europe.

So where did that word ‘oology’ come from? The OED says that it is a combination of ‘oo’ and ‘logy’ but that really does not make sense to me as ‘ology’— not ‘logy’—is the standard suffix meaning ‘the scientific study of’. For example, Wikipedia lists 342 ‘ologies’ all of which appear to append ‘ology’ onto a subject of study: bi-ology, ichthy-ology, ornith-ology. The OED also says that ‘oologia’ is the Latin version first used in 1691, probably derived from ‘oion’ Greek word for egg. My guess is that it’s a word that egg collectors made up to give their hobby a patina of science.

The word ‘oology’ became associated with egg-collecting in the Victorian era but largely disappeared from the ornithological literature in the 1920s, probably because egg-collecting fell out of favour (and was eventually outlawed). The study of eggs waxed and waned throughout the twentieth century with a monumental book—The Avian Egg—by AL and AJ Romanoff published in 1949 being one of the highlights. Over the past decade or so, the study of bird’s eggs has enjoyed a resurgence with new tools available for measuring colours and shapes but few ornithologists use the word oology any more.

Recent books about bird’s eggs

SOURCES

• Anonymous (1908) Mr. W. C. Hewitson. The Ibis Jubilee Supplement 2: 182–185.
• Birkhead T (2016) The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg. Bloomsbury USA.
• Hewitson WC (1831-38) British oology: being illustrations of the eggs of British birds, with figures of each species, as far as practicable, drawn and coloured from nature : accompanied by descriptions of the materials and situation of their nests, number of eggs, &c. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Charles Empson [first edition available here]
• Hewitson WC (1859) Recent discoveries in European oology. The Ibis 1: 76-80
• Kiff L (2005) History, present status, and future prospects of avian eggshell collections in North America. The Auk 122: 994–999,

Footnotes

1. ovology: is, according to the dictionary, one variant of oology but I have seen it in print
2. sound ridiculous when you think about them or repeat them: this is called semantic satiation or wordnesia and can happen with any word
3. advertisement: in Magazine of Natural History 3 (end matter)—”On the First of January, 1831, will be published, the First Number of British Oology, being illustrations of the Eggs, Nidification, &c. of British Birds“
4. subscribers to British Oology: the full list is at the beginning of the first edition.
5. Hewitson quotations: from Hewitson 1831 pages 3, 8, and 8-9, respectively
6. useful for classification: this idea persisted well into the 20th century despite ample evidence that it eggs were not a useful trait for taxonomy. I expect that some of this persistence was driven by a desire to justify the collecting of eggs
7. museum of oology: the Museum of Comparative Oölogy was started by William L. Dawson in 1916, and is now part of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

An Eye for Photography

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 8 April 2019

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 in his films, and to act as what in film lingo is called ‘best boy’, looking after equipment and lighting, as well as nest-finding when we were in the field.

I lived on the property with Bill and his family and every morning took chicken scraps from the local butcher out to the feed several hawks and owls housed in big flight aviaries at the edge of a woodlot. The raptors largely ignored me as I cleaned up leftovers and piled chicken parts on a platform for their daily meal. One day, though, I heard a whoosh behind me and as I turned saw a red-tailed hawk with talons splayed, only a meter from my face. I somehow dodged in panic but one of the bird’s talons ripped open the left side of my head with a gash starting only a cm or two from my eye.

Eric Hosking

As Bill’s wife, Mary, was patching me up, he told me the story of Eric Hosking, who had lost an eye to a Tawny Owl when he was only 28 but already famous for his bird photography. Hosking lived in north London and in the spring of 1937 had set up a blind on a Tawny Owl nest near his home. Late in the evening of 12 May, he was climbing to his blind when one of the parent owls attacked (as they are now well known to do around their nests), striking his face and blinding his left eye. While this was a tragic accident, the subsequent publicity marked a turning point in Hosking’s career. Although Hosking’s photos were already widely published, the publicity over the loss of his eye while photographing birds made him a national celebrity.

Hosking was a spectacularly good bird photographer, who went on to write at least 14 books illustrated with his photographs. In 1970, he published his autobiography, An Eye for a Bird, in which he described how he lost his left eye more than 30 years earlier. That book was wildly popular and went through at least 7 editions. Just last year, it was made available in digital form on Amazon UK Kindle (here).

Hosking’s best photos, in my opinion, show birds in action, and are not simply portraits of birds on a pond or a stick. His action photos are all the more remarkable because, by today’s digital standards, bird photography in the 1930s was staggeringly difficult. To take a picture in those days, the photographer had to calculate the best f-stop and shutter speed for the lighting conditions, focus on a plate on the back of the camera, insert the film holder (containing a glass plate with the emulsion on one side) into the camera, and then hope nothing changed when the bird showed up and the shutter was pressed. Photographers among you will recognize how difficult it must have been to take pictures at the equivalent of ISO 10. On a good day, Hosking might get 12 exposed plates that he could take home to develop and print.

Barn Owl (1936) by Eric Hosking

Like all photographers that I know, Hosking liked to keep on top of the latest technological advances. He was one of the first to use flash bulbs in bird photography, thereby obtaining some of the earliest photos of birds at night. Previously, he would have had to use flash powder that must have been incredibly dangerous in woods and grasslands. In the 1940s, he also pioneered the use of electronic flash to capture and freeze birds in flight, showing things that nobody had been able to see before, like the bending of feathers and the angles of the wings on the up- and down-strokes.

Kingfisher (1951) by Eric Hosking

Because of, and in addition to, his contributions to bird photography, Hosking wrote several papers for bird journals, and was a champion for bird conservation. He was also president or vice-president of the BOU, RSPB, the Nature Photographic Society,  and the British Naturalists’ Association, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to both nature photography and conservation. In 1965, the Natural History Museum began a Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition that Hosking often judged. The first winner was C. V. R. Dowdeswell for his colour photo of a Tawny Owl [1], presented by none other than David Attenborough [2].

Attenborough (L), Dowdeswell (R) and the award-winning photo

Cherry (above) and Richard (below) taking a photo of a bird’s nest

Hosking was not the first bird photographer to gain national and international fame for his work. That honour is shared by Richard and Cherry Kearton in England, and a trio of naturalists in America. The Kearton brothers [3] were from a small village in the Yorkshire Dales where they developed an early interest in photography. Their first bird photos were taken in the 1880s, when they were in still in their teens. Cherry is credited with taking the first photo of a bird’s nest and eggs in 1892, when he was just 21. In 1898, the Keartons published a book (available here), With Nature and a Camera, about their 1896 trip to St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides northwest of Scotland. That book—illustrated with 160 of their photographs—is still quite readable, full of observations of and insights into the relationships between the people and birds on those remote islands, and the techniques developed by the Keartons for observation and photography.

cormorants and guillemots, St Kilda 1896, by Cherry Kearton

Finley (above) and Bohlman (below) with flickers

While the Keartons were exploring St Kilda, two American naturalists—William L. Finley and Herman T. Bohlman, both in their twenties—were beginning to photograph birds in the western USA. One of their goals was to use their photography to promote bird conservation. In 1905, Bohlman and Finley explored the Klamath River Valley along the Oregon-California border. Their writings and photos were a major impetus for President Teddy Roosevelt to set aside federal bird refuges in the west.

In 1907, Finley and Bohlman published American Birds (available here), with 21 chapters, each about a different species and illustrated with 137 of their photographs. Finley married his wife, Irene, in 1906, and she accompanied him on all of his subsequent expeditions, gradually taking over from Bohlman who decided to stay at home to attend to his family. All of their archived photographs (available here) are attributed to all three people so it is now impossible to know who took what, but clearly Irene was one of the earliest, and few, women bird photographers

Belted Kingfishers (1901) by HT Bohlman

As for bird collecting and egg collecting, bird photography has been largely a man’s game, with precious few exceptions. This 2015 listing of the world’s dozen best bird photographers, for example, mentions no women. I am aware of a few very talented women nature photographers working today and will highlight their work in a later post,. Many of those women, like Irene Findley, often shared the limelight with their male partners, or worked in their shadows

SOURCES

• Bevis J (2007) Direct From Nature: The Photographic Work of Richard & Cherry Kearton. Axminster, UK: Colin Sackett.
• Edwards G, Hosking E, Smith S (1947) Aggressive display of the ringed plover. British Birds 40:12–19.
• Finley WL, Bohlman HT (1907) American Birds: Studied and photographed from life. New York: Scribner’s.
• Hosking D. (2017) Book Review: An Eye for a bird. British Birds (3 Jan 2017 available here)
• Hosking E, Lane F (1970) An Eye for a Bird. London: Hutchinson.
• Kearton R, Kearton C (1898) With nature and a camera; being the adventures and observations of a field naturalist and an animal photographer. London: Cassell.

Footnotes

1. colour photo of a Tawny Owl: is it just a coincidence that this was the winning photo, as that was the species that had taken out Hosking’s eye
2. David Attenborough: was already well known in 1965, having for more than a decade worked for the BBC
3. Kearton brothers: although both Richard and Cherry are often credited with their photographs, Cherry was really the photographer where Richard was the all-round naturalist and writer.

Ornitholojests

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 1 April 2019 (posted 5 April, see footnote 10)

Most of the ornithologists that I know have a great sense of humour. My old friend and mentor, James L. Baillie often took me birding when I was a teenager and his typical response when I could not identify a big, distant bird was “You know the crow?”. At first, he was almost always right but this soon became his response whenever I could not identify a bird, no matter how big or colourful. He also liked to pun on the names of birders and ornithologists, as in calling Dean Amadon, the curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History, the ‘Dean of Ornithology’. Once on a long drive from Toronto to the AOU meeting in Duluth, Minnesota, he entertained us with ornithological humour for the entire round trip.

As today is April Fool’s Day, it’s seems appropriate to chronicle some biological humour from the past. On April 1^st even Charles Darwin was subjected to a bit of fun by his shipmates as he recorded in his Beagle Diary: April 1st All hands employed in making April fools. — at midnight nearly all the watch below was called up in their shirts; Carpenters for a leak: quarter masters that a mast was sprung. — midshipmen to reef top-sails; All turned in to their hammocks again, some growling some laughing. — The hook was much too easily baited for me not to be caught: Sullivan cried out, “Darwin, did you ever see a Grampus: Bear a hand then”. I accordingly rushed out in a transport of Enthusiasm, & was received by a roar of laughter from the whole watch. [1]

Humour about birds, birding and ornithology has been the subject of several books, at least one scholarly paper, and for many years an irregular publication of the AOU. Birds are also featured in several animated films and newspaper/magazine cartoons, but few of those can truly be called ornithological [2]. The exceptions are the many bird-featured The Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson [3] that were the staple of oral presentations about birds (and just about every other branch of science) in the 1980s and 90s.

Humorous books about birds are mostly about birding [4] but my favourite is The Book of Terns, a collection of groaner puns about terns, in cartoon form. Published first in 1978 it was soon out of print but then was reprinted in 2011 and is readily available (with a new cover) from Amazon and well worth buying if you like puns and charming cartoons. It is now published by Ternaround Press, whatever that is.

The Book of Terns (1978)

The scholarly paper noted above is a three-page article by Richard Lewin briefly describing a dozen humorous biological hoax publications, some amusing titles, several parodies, and a short list of funny scientific names. Several of his examples are from the ornithological literature but he highlights a hoax that I will write more about another time, and a mini-journal called The Auklet: An Occasional Journal for Ornithologists that was made available to the attendees of at least six AOU meetings between 1935 and 1976.

The first issue of The Auklet was distributed at the AOU meeting in Toronto in October (or rather Auktober) 1935. The cover art depicting a laughing Crested Auklet—probably drawn by the great bird artist Terrence M. Shortt [5]—was on the cover of the next 5 issues at least (see below). The cover of that first issue claims that it was ‘Published at a Loss‘ as a ‘Continuation of the Nutty Bulletin’. Articles had titles like ‘A Method for the control of the Profanitory Warbler’, and the Recent literature section accused Percy Taverner of plagiarism when he combined his Birds of Eastern Canada and Birds of Western Canada into a single volume Birds of Canada. By later standards this was rather genteel humour.

First edition of the Auklet (1935)

The second edition (date?) described a new species—the Hudsonian corncrake—noting that it was nocturnal and so secretive that it had not yet been seen. And the fifth edition (1971) described a marsupial pelican. One issue, that I recall, had some clever doggerel about birds, written, I think, by Terry Shortt of cover art fame.

1976 edition

The sixth issue of The Auklet was distributed to attendees at the centennial AOU meeting in August (or rather Aukust) 1976 in Haverford, Pennsylvania. I gave my first scientific paper at that meeting, and wondered at the time if some of the material in The Auklet might offend [6] some of the senior ornithologists (and that may have been intended). Ernst Mayr, for example, was moderator in the session that I spoke in and we got on very well. I thought at the time that the bit on him in The Auklet was a little unfair: Ernst Mayr (to neophyte taxonomist): “Why be difficult—when with just a little more effort you can be impossible.” [7]

That 1976 edition contained several articles spoofing subjects that were topical at the time, and a multiple-choice Rorschach test with ornithological answers. Many prominent ornithologists were subjected to a bit of (good-natured?) ridicule in a review of recent publications by J. Mansfield-Burger, S. Oleson, P. Broadcrap, J. Crowcrap, C. Simply, and A. Seduccia [8]. I knew many of these people and suspect that they were not at all amused. The issue ended with a few pages of corny (dad) jokes which, to me, were the only funny bits in that edition: After completing her treatise on bird development and being told of a Peruvian passerine which is known to have a nestling life of 87 days, Mrs. Nice was heard to exclaim, “That’s the most nidicolous thing I ever heard”. [9]

Whether or not you enjoy the sort of humour in The Auklet, that ‘journal’ is an interesting and useful window on the history of the AOU. If I can get scans of all of the editions, I will post them as PDFs on the AOS history site. I see that the AOS archives at the Smithsonian has at least some copies and I have the 1976 edition, but if any readers have old copies that they could either scan or send me the original or a photocopy, I will make them available here.

SOURCES

• Delacorte P, Witte MC (1978) The Book of Terns. New York: Penguin Putnam
• Lewin RA (1983) Humor in the scientific literature. BioScience 33:266–268.

Footnotes

1. Darwin quote: from his Beagle Diary (transcript here)
2. animated films: the cartoon characters Donald Duck and his clan, Daffy Duck, RoadRunner, Tweety, Woodstock, and Woody Woodpecker are probably the best known
3. Gary Larson: has apparently always been interested in animals and his biological insights are remarkably spot on
4. humorous books about birding: there are so many of these that they probably deserve a post of their own. I show a few covers below.
5. Terrence M. Shortt: was my friend and mentor during the 1960s. Terry worked as a collector, preparator and diorama producer at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto for 46 years. He attended that 1935 meeting in Toronto and the drawing looks very much like his style. He may also have drawn the cartoons in that issue but I cannot be so sure.
6. Auklet might offend: in retrospect, my worry about offence probably just reflected my polite Canadian sensibilities but even today I cringe at ad hominem ‘humour’
7. quotation about Ernst Mayr: from The Auklet 6: 36. I suspect that many would claim that this is the sort of thing that Mayr might have well have said.
8. quotation about M.M. Nice: from The Auklet 6: 35
9. prominent ornithologists subjected to ridicule: respectively (but not respectfully), Joanna Burger, Storrs Olson, Pierce Brodkorb, Joel Cracraft, Charles Sibley and Alan Feduccia
10. 5 April 2019: I posted this essay from my iPad on April Fool’s Day but the joke was on me. The next day WordPress sent me a message to say that they had suspended access to my account via iOS 12 due to a security breach. They sent me a note about this on 2 April and asked me to re-establish my credentials and re-post but I deleted that email without reading. Then, last night, I wondered why I had not received the usual email from WordPress with this week’s post, and looked through my deleted emails.

Contemplating the Tundra

CELEBRATING
THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN ORNITHOLOGY

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 25 March 2019

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 know only about their contributions but not who they were (see here), (ii) or working largely in the background for their husbands (see here), fathers [1], or employers (see here), (iii) or conducting research as at least equal partners with those men but too often given second-billing (see here), (iv) or studying birds as a hobby but even then rising to the top of their field (see here and here).

Kessel in 2005

This week I am highlighting the work of one of the few women to be employed as a professional ornithologist before 1970: Brina Kessel. As a university professor conducting research on birds she achieved international renown for her research and her books about the birds of Alaska. Dr Kessel, who died in 2016, spent her entire academic career at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and her contributions will be highlighted at the upcoming AOS meeting in June in Anchorage. Because her work is ‘contemporary’ it will be known to ornithologists who worked in the latter half of the 20th century, so I am going to highlight here some of her early influences and experiences that may be less well known.

Kessel was born in Ithaca, New York to graduate student parents who moved to Storrs, Connecticut, when she was quite young so that her father could take up faculty position—in English—at the university there. Her mother studied entomology at Cornell but both parents took ornithology classes from Arthur A. Allen. They were also naturalists who kindled Brina’s early interest in birds.

Brina first experienced alpine tundra on a family trip to the top of Mount Washington (New Hampshire) where she was bitten by the tundra bug, a chronic illness that I share with many of my friends. She once quipped that her preference for tundra habitats “must have been a mutant gene that I had” [2]. Gordon Orians thinks that we might have an evolved response to prefer certain savannah-like habitats, so Brina might have been right about her tundra-loving gene.

Brina returned to Ithaca to be an undergraduate at Cornell where she took part-time jobs on the Poultry Department and became acquainted with Arthur A. Allen and Paul Kellogg, occasionally helping them with their frog and bird song recordings. Many of the undergraduate men were away from school contributing to the war effort so Brina was not held back by the sort of misogyny that might have limited her opportunities for research as an undergrad.

She loved that work and decided to seek an advanced degree with Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin in 1947. Leopold founded the study of wildlife management and was a leading American ecologist so she set her sites high. Brina had chosen wisely as she was very interested in the growing interest in conservation, biodiversity, and wilderness protection. Unfortunately, Leopold died from a heart attack while fighting a brush fire on his neighbour’s property a few months after Brina began her studies. As if that was not enough, the University of Wisconsin, in those days, would not allow women into their wildlife management program so Brina was unable to pursue a PhD there.

Kessel (far right) looking at a Belted Kingfisher held by A.A. Allen

Frustrated on those two fronts, Brina returned to Cornell for her PhD, studying the behaviour and ecology of Starlings under Allen’s supervision. About 90 Starlings had been released in Central Park in New York and by 1950 the species had spread across the United Sates to the Rocky Mountains. They may already have numbered as many as 100 million but their breeding biology had never been studied in North America. Based on 7 years field study from 1945 to 1951 she completed her PhD in two years and immediately moved to Alaska.

Her first job at the University of Fairbanks was as lecturer but she quickly gained a faculty position and by 1967 was head of that department. Over the years she explored much of the state, particularly the arctic and alpine tundra regions that she loved so much

Soon after her faculty appointment, she put in a proposal to travel by boat down the Colville River studying the birds of that region with her grad school friend, Tom Cade. That river, however, flowed into the US Naval Petroleum Reserve on the north slope, and she was told that “You can not come up on to the Reserve because the Navy will not allow any woman on the Petfore Reserve unless they are married, and with their husband” [2]. Brina was sorely disappointed but was able to send a U of A freshman—George Schaller—in her stead. She liked Schaller’s interest in natural history and enthusiasm but had little inkling of his eventual success as conservationist and writer. Schaller later went with Kessel and the Muries on an expedition down the Sheenjek valley in 1956.

1956 expedition to the Sheenjek valley. L-R: Robert Krear, Olaus Murie, Noel Wien, Mercedes and Justice William O. Douglas, Mardy Murie, and George Schaller. Wien was the pilot and the Douglases were just visiting.

While she led many field expeditions herself, Brina also sent many others off into the Alaskan wilderness to survey the birds. She did, however, analyze the data and take a major role in writing up those studies for publication. Throughout her career she also did not hesitate to take on leadership roles, including a two-year stint as the 45th president of the American Ornithologists’ Union from 1992-94, only the second woman to serve in that capacity [3]. Despite, or perhaps because of, her frequent administrative roles, Brina realized that her field trips were “...where I’ve been most content and happy in my life. Out there just contemplating the tundra” [3].

Kessel showing Steve MacDonald (L) and Dan Gibson (R) how to skin a bird

SOURCES

• Albin E (1731-38) A natural history of birds. Illustrated with a hundred and one copper plates… Published by the Author, Eleazar Albin, and carefully colour’d by his Daughter and Self, from the Originals, drawn form the live Birds. London.
• Kessel B (1989) Birds of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska. Their Biogeography, Seasonality, and Natural History. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. 
• Kessel B (1998) Habitat Characteristics of Some Passerine Birds in Western North American Taiga. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press.
• Kessel B, Cade TJ (1958) Birds of the Colville River, northern Alaska. Biological Papers of the University of Alaska no. 2.
• Kessel B, Schaller GB (1960) Birds of the Upper Sheenjek Valley, northeastern Alaska. Biological Papers of the University of Alaska no. 4.
• Orians G, Heerwagen JH (1992) Evolved responses to landscapes. In: Barlow JH, Cosmides L, Tooby J (Eds), The Adapted Mind, Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Footnotes

1. working for their…fathers: Eleazar Albin‘s daughter Elizabeth did many of the hand-coloured etchings in his 1731-38 book
2. Kessel quotations: from interview with Roger Kaye, 22 January 2003, available here
3. second woman AOU president: the first was Fran James from 1984-86

IMAGES: Kessel (top) from University of Alaska Friends of Ornithology Newsletter, May 2007; book covers from the internet; Kessel and Allen and Kessel (bottom) from University of Alaska Museum website (here); 1956 expedition from USFWS website (here).