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

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

Mr. Cairngorms

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 18 February 2019

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 archives here at Queen’s University [1] but the man was exceptionally careful not to record (or preserve) any personal opinions in his letters or field notes. I wrote to Watson to learn more about Wynne’s interactions with David Lack, the leading evolutionary ecologist of the day, who saw no need for anything different from the sort of individual selection described by Darwin.

Wynne-Edwards and Watson had, for example, taken David Lack on a walk in the Cairngorms in 1968 at a time when the two men were having a fierce debate about group selection [2]. But, as Watson wrote to me, their meeting was extremely amicable and group selection was, as far as he could remember, never mentioned. Lack impressed everyone by spotting a rare bird and a rare plant [3], and the day turned out to be a pleasant hike in the mountains with a focus on natural history.

Adam Watson banding a ptarmigan chick

Watson was on that day-hike with Lack and Wynne-Edwards, not only because he worked with Wynne, but also because he was an expert on the Cairngorms, three plateaus of wild natural beauty in the eastern highlands of Scotland, dotted with the blunted fists of mountains rising above the plateaus. Five of those mountains are among the 6 highest peaks in Scotland and snow can fall at any time of the year. I have never been to that part of Scotland but descriptions of both the landscape and the birds remind me of High Arctic Canada, with breeding Snow Buntings and Rock Ptarmigan, and even the occasional Lapland Longspur and Snowy Owl. Watson loved it there and spent much of his life exploring and studying the region. He certainly earned the local moniker of ‘Mr Cairngorms’.

I first encountered Watson’s research in the 1970s in a graduate course at UBC in ecology where we read his classic papers with Jenkins and Moss on the causes of red grouse cycles in Scotland. These Scottish biologists were clearly in the Elton/Chitty/Krebs school of ecology, wherein they attributed population fluctuations to extrinsic factors like food supply and predation.

Red Grouse numbers on one study area in Scotland, 1957-1961

My second encounter with Watson’s work began in the 1980s when I started studying Rock Ptarmigan in the Canadian High Arctic. Watson had done his own PhD in 1956 on Rock Ptarmigan in Scotland. He continued to study that species at least until 1964 but then turned his attention to the more widespread and economically important Red Grouse. We were interested in behavioural ecology, specifically sexual selection with respect to combs and plumages, so it was important for us to keep the basic ecology of ptarmigan (of which the Red Grouse is one) in mind. We were also inspired by the experimental approach that Watson and colleagues took to addressing questions of interest.

  During the 1980s, Peter Hudson, Andy Dobson and their colleagues discovered a role for parasites in these population fluctuations. The result was a fierce conflict between Watson and the others about the controlling factors in population regulation. Thirty 30 years later, now that the dust has settled a bit, I expect that both camps had useful data and arguments to bring to bear on population cycles.

Most recently, when writing about the history of ornithology in Nunavut, I read Watson’s book [4] and papers from his summer on Baffin Island in 1953. In 1945, when he was only 14, Watson met Wynne-Edwards when Wynne moved to Aberdeen as Regius Professor. Wynne’s first academic position was at McGill University where he lectured from 1929 until the start of WWII. With their shared interest in natural history, Wynne and Watson often hiked in the mountains of northeastern Scotland.

Watson did his honours thesis at Aberdeen University studying ptarmigan under Wynne’s supervision, then in 1952 began his PhD continuing his ptarmigan research. At Wynne’s encouragement, Watson applied for and won a Carnegie Arctic Scholarship to attend McGill University for a year, associated with the nearby Arctic Institute of North America. It was there that the Director, Pat Baird, invited Watson to be zoologist on a 13-man expedition [5] to Baffin Island in 1953.

Watson studying Snowy Owls (sketch by James Houston [6]

The purpose of that expedition was to study the geology, glaciers, zoology and botany of an area called the Penny Highlands on the Cumberland Peninsula on the southeast coast of Baffin. They departed Montreal on 12 May and returned 4 months later. Watson conducted probably the first reasonably accurate census of the densities of tundra-breeding birds, and did a comprehensive study of Snowy Owl breeding biology and ecology. In his studies of both the owls on Baffin and the ptarmigan in Scotland, Watson was a pioneer in the field that we now call behavioural ecology.

Watson was clearly thrilled with his experiences on that expedition: It was a very fine summer trip. Being on that expedition with my expedition colleagues and Inuit companions, and studying Arctic wildlife among the finest mountains I had ever seen, were a rare treat and a highlight of my life. Perhaps they were the highlight.[7].

One clear attraction was that that region in particular, and Baffin Island in general, had rarely been explored by scientists. Only two ornithologists had so far done any work on Baffin: Bernhard Hantzsch on an ill-fated expedition to cross the island in 1909-1911, and Dewy Soper looking for the breeding grounds of the blue goose in the 1920s. Watson thus did not really know what to expect on the Penny Highlands so he did both general surveys and focused studies.

Toward the end of the summer they were joined by Wynne-Edwards who had been studying seabirds at Cape Searle at the tip of the Cumberland Peninsula. In preparation for their trip back to civilization everyone got their hair cut. I expect that Watson really treasured the photo above where his PhD supervisor was cutting his hair in one of the most beautiful outdoor barbershops in the world.

Adam Watson died [8] on 23 January 2019. He was 88 years old. I never had the privilege of meeting him, but I feel honoured to have known him even just by email. Someday I will visit the Cairngorms to pay tribute to his tireless efforts to preserve that interesting part of Scotland for both the birds and hares, and for people like him that love wild places.

SOURCES

• Birkhead TR, Wimpenny J, Montgomerie R (2014) Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Hudson P, Tapper S (1979) Grouse populations—do they cycle? Annual Review of Game Conservancy 11:17–23.
• Hudson PJ, Dobson AP,  Newborn D (1985) Cyclic and non-cyclic populations of red grouse: a role for parasitism? In: Ecology and genetics of host-parasite interactions (Ed by Rollinson D, Anderson RM). Pp 79-89. London: Academic Press. London.
• Hudson PJ (1986) The effects of parasitic infections on the population fluctuations of red grouse in the north of England. In: Proceedings of the Third International Grouse Symposium (ed. By Hudson PJ, Lovell TWI )
• Jenkins D, Watson A, Miller GR (1963) Population Studies on Red Grouse, Lagopus lagopus scoticus (Lath.) in North-East Scotland. Journal of Animal Ecology 32: 317-376
• Montgomerie RD (2018) History of ornithology in Nunavut. pages 45-69 in Richards JM, Gaston AJ, editors. Birds of Nunavut. Vancouver: UBC Press.
• Watson A (1953) Birds in Cumberland Peninsula, Baffin Island. Canadian Field-Naturalist 71:87–109.
• Watson A (1956) The annual cycle of rock ptarmigan. Ph.D. thesis. Aberdeen Univ., Aberdeen, Scotland.

• Watson A (1957) The behaviour, breeding and food-ecology of the snowy owl Nyctea scandiaca. Ibis 99:419–462.

• Watson A (1963) Bird numbers on tundra in Baffin Island. Arctic 16:101–108.

• Watson A (1965) A population study of ptarmigan (Lagopus mutus) in Scotland. Journal of Animal Ecology 34: 135-172.

• Watson A (2011) A Zoologist on Baffin Island 1953. Rothersthorpe, UK: Paragon Publishing.

• Watson A, Moss R (1970) Dominance, spacing behaviour and aggression in relation to population limitation invertebrates. In A. Watson (Ed.), Animal populations in relation to their food (pp. 167-220). Blackwell Sci.
• Watson A, Moss R (1971) Spacing as affected by territorial behaviour, habitat and nutrition in red grouse (Lagopus l. scotius). In A. H. Esser (Ed.), Behaviour and environment; the use of space by animals and men (pp. 92-111). New York and London: Plenum Press.
• Watson A, Moss R (1977) Population ecology of red grouse. Annual Report of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology 1977 1978:18–21.
• Watson A, Moss R (1979) Population cycles in the Tetraonidae. Ornis Fennica 56:87–109.

Footnotes

1. archives at Queen’s University: Wynne-Edwards’s grand-daughter, Kathy Wynne-Edwards, was one of my faculty colleagues here in the Biology Department when Wynne-Edwards died, and a few of his relatives also lived in Kingston so this was a logical place for his archives to be deposited. See here for more details.
2. Debate about group selection: see Birkhead et al. 2014 pp 369-371
3. rare plant: the Lacks were on that hike especially to look for the rare Tufted Saxifrage (Saxifraga caespitosa) which was purported to be there.They did not find it but they did find the Brook Saxifrage (Saxifraga rivularis), a new site for a species that was also quite rare [see CORRECTION below]
4. Watson’s book: self-published in 2011, full 58 years after he went to Baffin Island this chronicle of his summer on the Canadian tundra is remarkably detailed and full of both adventure and natural history.
5. sketch by James Houston: Houston was a Canadian artist and novelist who lived for many  years in Cape Dorset on Baffin Island; he is credited with launching the production of Inuit prints and sculpture
6. 13-man expedition: only 12 returned as one of the glaciologists, Ben Battle, drowned and was buried on the tundra
7. quotation: from Watson 2011 page 5
8. Adam Watson died: see here and here

IMAGES: all photos and the drawing by Houston courtesy Adam Watson; the photos of Watson and Wynne-Edwards was taken by Hans Röthlisberger; graph modified from Figure 4 in Jenkins et al. (1963) with the addition of Red Grouse illustration from Birds of the World Online at https://www.hbw.com

CORRECTION: Thanks to Peter Lack—David Lack’s son, who was 16 at the time of that hike with his mother, father and 3 siblings—for these interesting details. I had previously reported here (and in Birkhead et al. 2014) that they were looking for and found the Brook Saxifrage.

In the Shadow of Men

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 11 February 2019

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 White and Henry Yard—who took me out and back liked to do so on certain tides to make the landings less dangerous. As the season was getting on and I still had a large part of the island to census, I decided, one day in June, to stay overnight so that I could get in 3-4 times as many hours on the island than was possible on a single visit. I took a tiny pup tent, two days’ food and water, a small camp stove full of fuel, a sleeping bag and a change of clothes as I knew I’d get wet.

My best-laid plans were thwarted by a fierce, unexpected storm that came to shore that night and lashed the island for more than a week. The storm was so wild that it prevented both the fishermen and an RCMP helicopter from picking me up. Often I had to spend hours in my little tent to stay dry and to keep from being blown off the cliffs. To pass the time I slept, made plans to stretch out my meagre food supply, and organized my field notes. I also built nooses of fishing line to catch some murres in case I needed to eat a few to survive as the storm was showing no signs of letting up. When cooped up in my little tent, I read, several times, the only book I had taken with me, Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, which had just come out in paperback. That book—and the experience of being stranded and rescued—had a profound effect on me.

Three things about Goodall’s book were important to my development and outlook as a scientist. First, and foremost, this was the first book I had read by a woman biologist/naturalist [1], and it was just as good as all the others. I think that Goodall’s book more or less marked a turning point for biology that has transformed the role of women during the past 50 years. Prior to Goodall’s book, I had read many of the recent and now classic ‘popular’ books by and about naturalists—Tinbergen, Lorenz, Lack, Robert Ardry, George Schaller, Ernest Thompson Seton, Albert Hochbaum, Fred Bodsworth, James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson, to name just a few—all by men.

At that time, I knew of excellent recent work by women ornithologists—MM Nice, Mary Willson, Mercedes Foster, Janet Kear, Susan Smith—published in the bird journals, but they were very much in the minority. I have been looking at the publications by female ornithologists in The Auk and The Condor over the last 135 years and the trend—and the exponential increase in female authorships since 1970—is shown on the graph below, reflecting a similar trend in The American Naturalist.

My own experience as an academic reflects this welcome pattern as well. My first group of four graduate students were all men, all of whom went on to academic positions at excellent universities. My last (in both senses of the word) four graduate students were all female. It’s too early to tell what career path they will take but one of them just got a tenure-track job. This change in the composition of my research group since 1980 does not reflect any conscious attempt on my part to train women scientists—everyone that I took on as a graduate student was simply the best applicant at the time. During my first decade teaching (1980s), most undergraduate biology students were male; when I looked out on my 48-student History and Philosophy of Biology class last week I could count only 9 men.

Stilt Sandpiper, Churchill 1972

Goodall’s book also reminded me how much fun it is to study animals close up, and how much better your insights can be when you can get extremely close to animals without seeming to disturb them. I enjoyed that aspect of studying seabirds that summer in Newfoundland, but also when studying both sandpipers and collared lemmings on the tundra at Churchill, Manitoba, the previous two summers. Such close observations of behaviours seemed to be important for testing hypotheses in the nascent field of behavioural ecology, especially where social interactions were concerned. Partly for that reason, I returned to the arctic with my newly-minted research group in 1980 as I knew the birds would be tame, could be watched at close distance, and could be followed for as long as we wanted on the open tundra. That was one of the reasons that we were able to document high levels of extrapair mating in Lapland Longspurs, years before DNA fingerprinting revealed that extrapair paternity was common in passerine birds [2].

Ike and Tina just outside my tent

Finally, I was amused that Goodall had named all of the chimpanzees that she watched. I knew that Lorenz and others had named their study animals but I always thought that that would not be acceptable in a serious scientific study. Goodall reminded me that there was nothing wrong with making research fun and entertaining. Right away I started to give names to the pairs of seabirds nesting near my tent—was I going a little stir crazy? For the local pairs of puffins, black guillemots, herring gulls and common murres, I chose the names of my favourite folk and rock couples—Ian and Sylvia, Ike and Tina, (Peter) Paul and Mary, Jim and Jean, and Chuck and Joni [3]. Years later, we often gave names to our favourite pairs of Lapland Longspurs, Snow Buntings and Rock Ptarmigan. And, in the early 1990s, when we studied Ruffs on Gotland in the Baltic, we named each of the males on every lek and used hand-drawn mug shots to identify them individually.

Ruffs on Gotland—copy of a page from my 1990 field notes on Gotland

Today (11 February 2019) is the UN-sponsored International Day of Women and Girls in Science, designed to celebrate and promote the roles of women in all of the sciences. While we have come a long way since Jane Goodall began working on chimpanzees, less than 30% of scientists worldwide are women, and there are still many barriers and sources of discrimination and gender bias in the sciences.

At the AOS meeting in Anchorage this year we will have some displays celebrating the roles of women in ornithology. For a long time, ornithology was largely a man’s game [4] but there have been some great, but relatively unknown, woman ornithologists in the past. I have tried to highlight some of their accomplishments on this blog [4]. In that same vein, I will devote all of March (Women’s History Month in the USA) to posts about the contributions of women to ornithology before Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees.

SOURCES

• Bronstein JL, Bolnick, DI (2018) “Her Joyous Enthusiasm for Her Life-Work…”: Early Women Authors in The American Naturalist. American Naturalist 192:655-663.

• Burke T, Bruford MW (1987) DNA fingerprinting in birds. Nature 327:149–152.

• Klopfer PH (1962) Behavioral aspects of ecology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

• Goodall JvL (1971) In the shadow of man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Footnotes

1. first book I had read by a woman biologist/naturalist: it’s only when writing this post today that I realized this. It certainly did not surprise me at the time.
2. Chuck and Joni: my friends and I went to hear folk concert by the Mitchells at a coffee shop (either Penny Farthing or Riverboat) in Toronto’s Yorkville Village one night in 1967 or so. But the couple had broken up the day before and so a very nervous Joni did the gig on her own. She never looked back.
3. extrapair paternity was common in passerine birds: see Burke and Buford (1987) for an early example
4. largely a man’s game: see previous posts here, here, here, here, and here

IMAGES: all photos, the Ruff drawings, and the Auk/Condor graph by the author; American Naturalist graph modified from Figure 1 in Bronstein and Bolnick (2018)

CORRECTIONS: in the original post I forgot to add the Bronstein and Bolnick reference, the image sources, and the drawings of Ruffs. All added on 13 Feb 2019

Three French Hens

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 24 December 2018

Tomorrow is Christmas Day and, like last year, I am spending the holidays in the north woods, a few km south of the southern tip of Algonquin Park, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. I wrote about the Twelve Days of Christmas song a year ago and am repeating that essay here with some new pictures and a few additions—including some details about those Three French Hens—that I have learned about over the past year.

I particularly like The Twelve Days of Christmas because the words are secular, even though there are myriad religious interpretations [1]. The song originated in an 18th century memory game, celebrating an annual period of drunkenness and merrymaking sandwiched between two religious feasts. Many of those twelve days are about birds that were prized for the table. In mediaeval England, this period following Christmas was presided over by the Lord of Misrule and in Scotland by the Abbott of Unreason, both titles that I would be proud to bear.

The words to this Christmas song were first published in English in the late 1700s as a rhyme in a book called Mirth without Mischief, likely derived from a much older French song of similar structure and content, Les Douze Mois. The now familiar tune was not written until 1905 by the English composer Frederic Austin who adapted it from a traditional English folk melody.

As you will recall—for by now it’s an ear worm that you can’t stop humming—the 12 days begin on Christmas Day with the partridge. On 5 or 6 of the following days, the gifts are birds, interrupted musically, thematically and enigmatically by those 5 golden rings. I have no idea why the first 7 gifts are birds, but I expect there are traditional and psychological reasons that have been claimed for this but they are probably all about food. There have also been many Christian interpretations of this song but really no evidence to support any of them. I find the secular interpretations to be far more interesting and valid.

In the almost 238 years since the rhyme was first published in English, there have been at least 20 different versions of the words, especially with respect to the birds. Some of these variants are undoubtedly Mondegreens [2], but they were often probably just attempts to make the words more relevant to a contemporary audience.

The PARTRIDGE—on the first day of Christmas— was always a partridge, except in Scott’s 1892 version where it was a “very pretty peacock.”  Some authors claim that the partridge was the Red-legged Partridge (Alectoris rufa) a very popular game bird that had just been successfully introduced to England from France in about 1770, and much more likely to perch in trees than the native and abundant Grey Partridge (Perdix perdix). But what about that pear tree, which again has been often claimed to have religious connotations. The French poem that may have been the basis for the English rhyme has a partridge representing the first month “Un’ Perdix Sole’. That version says that the bird flies in the woods (‘qui vol dans les bois’). The Perdix is the Grey Partridge, which in Old French was spelt ‘perdrix’ or ‘pertriz’, pronounced something very close to ‘pear tree’. I wonder if the English rhyme was originally ‘partridge and a perdrix’, though that would be two birds for day one. Nonetheless it seems to me quite likely that the pear tree was actually the perdrix, and had nothing at all to do with pears or trees.

On day 2, the TURTLE DOVES were French hens in one 1877 version, and the FRENCH HENS on day 3 were once ‘fat hens’ in 1864, and turtle doves in 1877. There’s a theme here as the first 3 birds were highly prized for the table, an excellent start to a period of feasting.

But why ‘French‘ hens? The Latin word for chicken is gallus and, as a result, the scientific name is Gallus gallus [3]. In Roman times, France was Gaul, and people who lived there were Gallic. It seems that the simple word association between the homonyms Gallus and Gallic irrevocably associated the fowl with France. Indeed, a rooster was often a decorative ornament on church bell towers in France during the Middle Ages, and the Gallic Rooster (see photo, right) was an important symbol during the French Revolution.

Bresse Gauloise

But also, when the Twelve Days rhyme was written, French hens were a prized table bird in both France and England. The breed Bresse Gauloise, for example, was sometimes called the ‘queen of poultry and the poultry of kings’. This breed originated in France in the late 16th century. La Fleche is also an ancient French breed from the Loire region of western France, and was renowned for its delicate flesh. During the 16th century hens from France were a luxury import from France. In the 19th century, the Houdan, another old breed from west of Paris, was one of the main meat breeds of France, and was imported to North America in 1865.

La Fleche

We humans are inordinately fond of eating chickens and a recent report suggests that the 60 billion chickens that we slaughter every year may turn out to be the paleontological signal of the Anthropocene. Of all the birds mentioned in the Twelve Days of Christmas, I doubt that anyone in 1800 could have predicted that the French hens and their kin would someday become the most abundant bird in the world, by at least an order of magnitude.

The CALLING BIRDS of day 4 are the most interesting to me as the original said ‘colly birds’ and subsequent variants said the birds were ‘canary’, ‘collie’, ‘colley’, ‘colour’d’, ‘curley’, ‘coloured’, ‘corley’, and finally ‘calling’ by Austin in 1909 published with his new tune. I am surprised no one ever suggested ‘collared’. The original ‘colly bird’ was the European Blackbird (Turdus merula) as ‘colly’ meant ‘black’ as in ‘coaly’, and is why border collies bear that name. The subsequent versions are undoubtedly the result of mis-hearings and misinterpretations.

The gift for day 5 in the original and modern version is GOLDEN RINGS but several sources claim that these are birds too, probably European Goldfinches, which were called goldspinks in the 1700s. Others have argued that these were Ring-necked Pheasants which have been claimed to have golden rings around their neck (but they don’t). The pheasant interpretation matches the culinary theme of the other 6 birds in the song, but the goldfinch was a popular cage bird in the 18th century. The melodic break in the song suggests a change of theme but the melody was added more than a century after the words.

The birds of days 6 and 7—the GEESE A-LAYING and the SWANS A-SWIMMING—round out the culinary theme before the song turns to dance providing some exercise after all that feasting, and chores that may have been neglected.

Here in the north woods the colly birds (and the only birds really calling) are Ravens, and the only ‘partridge’ is the Spruce Grouse, as all the geese, swans, doves, and goldfinches have departed for more southern winter quarters. The good news, this year, is that there are Pine and Evening Grosbeaks in the neighbourhood, as well as both species of redpoll. E-bird (map below) shows that I am well-situated (white star) to see Evening Grosbeaks in numbers, a bird I have seen only occasionally for the past 50 years.

Sightings of Evening Grosbeak Oct-Dec 2018 (from e-bird)

Counting the 5 golden rings, there are 28 individual birds in The Twelve Days of Christmas but I will be lucky to see even 28 individual birds on a day out in the winter woods here, where the temperature will be below freezing—and sometimes way below—for the next four months. That will not stop the 75 or more people who will gather in Algonquin Park for the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) on 29 December, where they will probably record fewer than 28 species [4] in a hard day’s work on foot, skis and snowshoes. This will be the 45th consecutive CBC for Algonquin Park and the 118th CBC since Frank Chapman started the count in 1900.

During the 19th century, the Christmas Side Hunt was a popular competition to gather game for the table during the 12 days of Christmas. Chapman, however, was a conservationist who saw great value in watching rather than hunting birds. That first CBC involved only 27 birdwatchers at 25 sites from Toronto, Ontario, to Pacific Grove, California, laying the foundations for what we now call citizen science.

French Hens (Houdans)

SOURCES

• Ray J (1676) Ornithologiae libri tres: in quibus aves omnes hactenus cognitae in methodum naturis suis convenientem redactae accuratè descripbuntur, descriptiones iconibus. London: John Martyn.

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Footnotes

1. myriad religious interpretations: see here, for example
2. Mondegreen: Jimi Hendrix created a classic ‘Mondegreen’ when he sang (at least to my ears) “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” in his song ‘Purple Haze’, first released as a single in 1967. Rock lyrics are a rich source of Mondegreens—words or phrases that are misheard—as Sylvia Wright, who coined the term, did when she heard a Scottish ballad say “Lady Mondegreen” when it actually said “laid him on the green”.
3. Gallus gallus: Linnaeus established this in 1758, but John Ray called them Gallus gallinaceus in 1676 and the name had clearly been in use for some time in England and Europe. Gallus gallus is, of course, the scientific name of the wild ancestor of the domestic hen, the Red Junglefowl of southeast Asia
4. fewer than 28 species: that’s what I predicted for last year and they did indeed record that number, and 4704 individuals. Their sighting rate was 31 birds per party hour and that was well above the average of 25. That’s a lot of work (maybe 3 birds per hour per party), but a great day out.

Joe Grinnell’s Notes

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 13 August 2018 (posted 21 Aug 2018)

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 beginning of the scientific revolution, where scholars were questioning everything, and basing conclusions on direct observations rather than hearsay, ancient texts, and idle speculation.

Detail from a page in Linnaeus’s commonplace book

John Ray and Francis Willughby [1] each had their own Commonplace Book, as required by their tutors at Cambridge.  In the late 1600s, the great English philosopher John Locke considered Commonplace Books to be so important to the progress of science that he published a scheme for properly indexing a commonplace book in an addendum to his influential An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [2]. And in the 18th century, Linnaeus used his Commonplace Book to record and develop his ideas about his binomial system of nomenclature, resulting in his Systema Naturae [3].

Commonplace books seemed to be de rigueur for scientists and scholars through the 1800s eventually evolving into the specialized (rather than all-encompassing) small notebooks (e.g. Moleskins) and field notebooks (e.g. Rite in the Rain) used by writers and naturalists, respectively, throughout the 20th century.

A page from Grinnell’s Field Journal from the Mojave 1914

In the early 1900s, the American ornithologist Joseph Grinnell thought that field notebooks were so important that he developed a systematic method of note-keeping that he taught all of his students and colleagues. His method, sometimes called the Grinnell System, involves at least two different books—the Field Notebook, carried everywhere to record observations immediately, and the Field Journal, to daily record experiences and observations as in a diary, using the Field Notebook. Each diary-like entry in the Field Journal is written in the evening, using the Field Notebook for details. The Field Journals, or separate notebooks, also include Species Accounts compiled during the course of a field trip, and a Catalog, recording the details of all specimens collected. The method seems simple enough but requires some discipline to maintain during busy field work. Grinnell even went so far as to recommend the sort of paper and ink needed to make the method historically valuable: The India ink and paper of permanent quality will mean that our notes will be accessible 200 years from now….we are in the newest part of the new world where the population will be immense in fifty years at most. [4]

 

I am an academic descendant of Grinnell [5] and while I am not a very disciplined diarist, I treasure the 57 notebooks that I have used to chronicle my field activities over the years. These books contain some data but they are mostly a summary of where I went, what I did, what the weather was like, who my companions were, what I found interesting each day in the field, and ideas for further work. My field data sheets and recordings occupy another 5 metres of book shelf and a few terabytes of hard drive space.

In 1908, Grinnell was appointed as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, where he set out to build a collection of birds and mammals from California. To do that he embarked on a series of expeditions to the Colorado Desert (1908), The Colorado River (1910), Mount Whitney (1911), the San Jacinto Mountains (1913), the Sierra Nevada (191–1920), and Lassen Peak (1924-1929).

Grinnell kept such careful field notes that the MVZ scientists decided to survey some of those same areas beginning in 2002, to see what, if anything, had changed over the past century. They called this the Grinnell Resurvey Project. Grinnell did not actually conduct censuses using repeatable, modern-day methods, but he did provide enough information that reasonable comparisons could be made.

Earlier this month, PhD student Kelly Iknayan and AOS Past President Steve Beissinger published a paper in PNAS using both Grinnell’s surveys and the recently completed replication to analyze the changes in bird fauna in the Mojave Desert of California. The nice thing about this resurvey is that most of the sites visited by Grinnell in the Mojave are on federal lands, with little or no anthropogenic influence in the intervening 100 years. The results are clear…and depressing.

Surveying 61 of the same sites studied by Grinnell, they found that the number of bird species at each site had declined, often significantly (red dots of figure below). And the number of sites where they found different birds had also declined for >125 of those 135 species. Only the Raven was found at significantly more sites a century later (blue dot, below).

By evaluating several potential causes for these changes, Iknayan and Beissinger found that climate change was the strongest predictor, particularly with respect to increasing drought conditions. As they point out, in their paper’s abstract: Climate change has caused deserts, already defined by climatic extremes, to warm and dry more rapidly than other ecoregions in the contiguous United States over the last 50 years. Desert birds persist near the edge of their physiological limits, and climate change could cause lethal dehydration and hyperthermia, leading to decline or extirpation of some species. [6]

I expect that Iknayan and Beissinger take better field notes that I do, especially as they are both also academic descendants of Grinnell [5] and work in his shadow at Berkeley. But even the best field biologists’ note-taking abilities are rapidly becoming anachronisms, I fear, with the advent of eBird, automated recording devices, and digital database apps. I think this is sad, not because I long for the good old days—I am a quite tech savvy—but because those detailed field journals are an important historical record [7[ that show both the human side of field work and the nuances associated with collecting data.

You could argue that Grinnell’s field surveys would have been more useful today if he had digitized his records and taken more quantitative measures, and you would be right to some extent. But field naturalists a century from now will no doubt lament the passing of the commonplace book and the Grinellian field notebook when they try to understand our quantitive, digitized, data stored faithfully in online repositories if those data are not also supplemented by a little personalized narrative.

SOURCES

• Charmantier I (2011) Carl Linnaeus and the visual representation of nature. HIST STUD NAT SCI 41:365–404.

• Iknayan KJ, Beissinger SR (2018) Collapse of a desert bird community over the past century driven by climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 201805123.

• Locke J (1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: The Buffet.

• Linné CV (1766) Caroli a Linné. Systema naturae : per regna tria natura, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis / (t.1, pt. 1 (Regnum animale) (1766)). Holmiae :Impensis direct. Laurentii Salvii.

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Footnotes

1. Ray and Willughby: see previous posts here, here, here, and here
2. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: see Locke (1690) available here
3. Sytema Naturae: see von Linné (1766)
4. Grinnell on paper and ink: cited from Wikipedia article on Grinnell, here
5. Academic descendants: me through Peter Grant to Ian McTaggart-Cowan to Grinnell; Beissinger through Bobbi Low to Frank Blair to Lee Dice to Grinnell (see here and here for details)
6. Quotation about climate change: from Iknayan and Beissinger 2018, abstract
7. Important historical record: see here for example

IMAGES: Linnaeus’s notebook from Charmantier (2011); Grinnell’s notebook from the Grinnell ECOREADER;  graphs modified from Iknayan and Beissinger (2018)

A Whiskey-Jack by Any Other Name

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 4 June 2018

Canada Jay, Algonquin Park, 1968

The year I turned 21, I got my dream job: seasonal naturalist at Algonquin Provincial Park. Algonquin, established in 1893, was only the second provincial park to be created in Canada, and the first to be designated to protect a natural environment [1].  This vast ‘wilderness’ area (7653 km²) is only 3 hours by car from Ottawa, 4 from Toronto, and 5 from Montreal. The park now gets more than a million visitors a year, concentrated mainly along the highway that runs east-west across its southern edge. At the time, I had birded and bird-banded only in southwestern Ontario, so this was a chance to see some boreal species on their breeding grounds, species that I had only seen previously on migration or in winter, if at all—Common Loons, White-throated Sparrows, Saw-whet Owls, Pine Grosbeaks, Red Crossbills, Ravens, Three-toed Woodpeckers, and Gray Canada Jays.

Because I was no longer in school, I started work at Algonquin two months earlier than the other half dozen seasonal naturalists, mainly to get the museum’s [2] specimen collections in order and to prepare for the onslaught of summer visitors. Seasonal naturalists were hired to interact with the visitors who flooded the park in July and August during the public schools’ summer vacation. I arrived at Algonquin at the end of April where I met Russell J. Rutter, the only full-time park naturalist, who lived near the small town of Huntsville, a half hour west of the park. Rutter was a crusty old guy but we got on well and he often took me out birding, botanizing, hiking the trails where we would lead nature walks, and howling for wolves [3].

One day, as we walked along some abandoned railway tracks, 3 Canada Jays appeared at the edge of the woods. Russ made a whispery-squeaky sound and all three birds flew right up to us, one landing on Russ’s hand to get some food that he had brought with him just for that purpose. Two of those jays had colour-bands (WR, and YORL [4]), and this was a family group, Russ said. Russ told me he had decided a few years earlier to start studying Canada Jays so that he could follow individuals through their lives. He had already discovered that they often travel in family groups, hoard food for the winter, and occupy year-round territories. I was enthralled—I had no idea that the birds I had watched breeding in southern Ontario were not doing what all birds did.

Russ was also furious with the AOU for changing the bird’s common name from Canada Jay to Gray Jay in its 1957 checklist. I must admit I was not really even aware of this as my field guide—the 3^rd edition of Peterson, published in 1947—called them Canada Jays and that’s what I would have called them but I had never seen one before. That summer, we naturalists often told the park visitors about the name change but also that the Native Algonquins had once called them whisky-jacks, which made for a good story.

from the AOU Checklist 1957

One of the seasonal naturalists that year was Dan Strickland, who had been an Algonquin Park naturalist the previous summer or two and was now studying Canada Jays (‘Geais Gris’) for his MSc thesis at the Université de Montréal. Dan was conducting his research in la réserve faunique de La Vérendrye in Québec, inspired by Rutter’s work in Algonquin. Dan’s focus was on their social behaviours and their food-caching strategies. He stayed at Algonquin as Park Naturalist for the rest of his career, and has continued to work on the Canada Jay for the past half century, one of the longest continuous studies of a bird species worldwide. Not surprisingly, Strickland was instrumental in the recent official change of the species’ name back to Canada Jay just last month. The popular press in Canada is all abuzz about this change, in part because calling them ‘Canada Jays’ may enhance the possibility that this species will now be recognized as Canada’s national bird.

Martinet’s etching of Canada Jay in Brisson (1760)

The Canada Jay was first described for science in 1760 as ‘Le Geay brun de Canada’ (Garrulus Canadensis fuscus) by the French zoologist  Mathurin Jacques Brisson in his Ornthologie, with a remarkably good illustration by François Nicolas Martinet. An English translation of Brisson’s common name might be the ‘Canada Brown Jay’ [5]. This description, and the illustration, were based on a specimen in the collection of René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, as neither Brisson nor Martinet had seen the bird in the wild. de Réaumur was primarily an entomologist but he had an extensive  private museum where he employed Brisson as what we would today call a ‘curator’.  Brisson’s description was the basis for Linnaeus presenting the bird’s  ‘official’ scientific name as Corvus canadensis, in 1766, but Linnaeus did not suggest a common name, as that was not the purpose of his work.

Thomas Pennant was probably the first to publish an English common name—Cinereous Crow [6]— for this species, in his Arctic Zoology of 1784. Pennant had never seen the bird alive either, relying instead on Samuel Hearne’s description [7]. Hearne joined the British Navy at the age of 11 and then the Hudson’s Bay Company at 21, stationed first at Fort Prince of Wales (now Churchill) in Manitoba. While there, he made 3 major expeditions into the interior of present-day Nunavut, in 1771 reaching the mouth of the Coppermine River where it drains into the Arctic Ocean. Hearne’s Journey, published posthumously in 1795, contains detailed species accounts of at least 50 bird species that he encountered on his expeditions, with remarkable insights into their behaviours and ecologies. Hearne called this jay the ‘Cinereous Crow (Perisoreus canadensis)’, noting in his account that “..it is called by the Southern Indians [presumably Cree], Whisk-e-jonish, by the English Whiskey-Jack, and by the Northern Indians [presumably Chipewyan] Gee-za…” [8]

Then, in 1829, John Richardson called this bird ‘The Whiskey-Jack (Garrulus canadensis)’ in his comprehensive Fauna Boreali-Americana, coauthored with William Swainson. Richardson had explored northern Canada with the Franklin Expeditions of 1819-22 and 1825-27, and would have had first hand experience with this species. A half-century later, with the publication of the first AOU checklist in 1886, the official names became Canada Jay and Perisoreus canadensis, and would remain that way until 1957.

from the AOU checklist 1886

During the Washington AOU conference in 2016, Dan Strickland mined the AOU archives at the Smithsonian to figure out how and why the common name of this species was changed by the AOU in 1957. Based on that information, he made a very compelling case to have the name changed back to Canada Jay. The details are complex but nicely outlined by Strickland here and here.

While the scientific names of birds (and all plants and animals) are assigned following some strict rules, there are no such rules for common names. Attempts to make some rules for common names have not been successful (see here for example), and for good reason, I think. Common names say something—not always useful (see here)—about appearance, vocalizations, habitat, and localities, as well honouring people—not always logically (see here)—and their contributions to science or discovery. Common names are what most of us use when we talk about birds and ‘official’ common names should probably, like all language, reflect usage rather than some esoteric rules. No amount of rule-making will stop duck hunters from using the names ‘whistler’, ‘sprig’, ‘greenhead’, ‘bluebill’, spoonbill’ or ‘skunkhead coot’ [9], nor the visitors to Algonquin Park from calling their favourite bird the ‘whiskey-jack’.

SOURCES

• American Ornithologists’ Union (1886) The code of nomenclature and check-list of North American birds. New York: American Ornithologists’ Union.
• American Ornithologists’ Union (1957) Check-list of North American birds. Ithaca, N.Y.: American Ornithologists’ Union.
• Brisson M-J, Martinet FN (1760) Ornithologie, ou, Méthode contenant la division des oiseaux en ordres, sections, genres, especes & leurs variétés (t.2 ). Parisiis: Ad Ripam Augustinorum, apud Cl. Joannem-Baptistam Bauche, bibliopolam, ad Insigne S. Genovesae, & S. Joannis in Deserto.
• Hearne S (1795) A journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean. London: Strahan and Cadell.
• Houston CS, Ball T, Houston M (2003) Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Linné CV (1766) Caroli a Linné. Systema naturae : per regna tria natura, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis / (t.1, pt. 1 (Regnum animale)), 12th edition. Holmiae :Impensis direct. Laurentii Salvii.
• Pennant T (1784-85) Arctic Zoology, 2 vols. London: Henry Hughs
• Rutter, R.J. 1969. A contribution to the biology of the Gray jay (Perisoreus canadensis). Canadian Field-Naturalist 83: 300-316.
• Strickland D (1969) Écologie, comportement social et nidification du Geai Gris (Perisoreus canadensis). Master’s Thesis, Univ. Montréal, Montréal.
• Strickland D (2017) How the Canada Jay lost its name and why it matters. Ontario Birds 35: 2-16.
• Swainson W, Richardson J (1831) Fauna boreali-americana, or, The zoology of the northern parts of British America: containing descriptions of the objects of natural history collected on the late northern land expeditions, under command of Captain Sir John Franklin, R.N. Part second, the birds. London: John Murray.

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Footnotes

1. Canadian provincial parks: Queen Victoria Park at Niagara Falls was Canada’ first provincial park, established in 1885 in part to clean up the area around the falls and reduce the incidence of crime
2. Algonquin park museum: in those days was on the shore of Found Lake but now is a spectacular Visitor Centre 30 km east of the old museum
3. howling for wolves: the Algonquin Wolf Howl, held in August every year, attracts more than a thousand visitors who gather at the roadside at sunset, hoping to hear the wolves respond to the park naturalists’ attempts to imitate the howls. Those howl imitations are so good that one year the naturalists mistakenly called back and forth to each other, each group assuming that they were hearing real wolves.
4. colour-bands: the letters refer to the colours, usually left-leg top and bottom, then right-leg top and bottom. So these birds were white on the left, red on the right, and yellow over orange on the left and red over light-blue on the right. Researchers like band combos that they can pronounce so these birds were ‘whir’ and ‘yorel’ to Rutter.
5. Canada Brown Jay: in Brisson’s day, ‘Canada’ referred to the French colony that we now call Québec.
6. Cinereous Crow: ‘cinereous’ means ‘ashy-grey’ which correctly describes the bird’s colour but we can be grateful that this name was never used after the middle of the 19th century. I have little doubt that early explorers to Canada in the 16th and 17th centuries will have said something about this species but I cannot find an earlier reference than Brisson (1760)
7. Samuel Hearne’s description: we know that Hearne gave Pennant a copy of his observations while Hearne was in England during the winter of 1782-83 (Houston et al. 2003)
8. quotation about Native names: from Hearne (1795, page 374)
9. hunter’s names for ducks: officially (AOU checklist) these are Common Goldeneye, Norther Pintail, Mallard, Lesser (or Greater) Scaup, Northern Shoveler, and Surf Scoter, respectively

IMAGES: Canada Jay photo by the author; pages from AOU checklists and Brisson are in the public domain

Professor Bumpus and his Sparrows

Guest Post

BY: Ted R. Anderson | 5 March 2018

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 Hermon Carey Bumpus at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island  It was actually the second of two interesting papers that Bumpus published on the recently introduced house sparrow, but more on these below.

Hermon Bumpus

Bumpus was born in Maine in 1862, and entered Brown in 1879 to study biology, graduating in 1884.  In 1886, he accepted a professorship at Olivet College in Michigan, a position he left in 1889 to complete a doctorate at the newly established Clark University, where he received the first PhD awarded by that university.  In 1890 he returned to Brown as assistant professor of zoology and was promoted to professor of comparative anatomy two years later.  He left Brown in 1900 to become assistant to Morris Jessup, president of the board of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  A year later Jessup promoted him to become the museum’s first director.

In 1911 Bumpus moved into academic administration as business manager of the University of Wisconsin, a position he held until 1914.  He then moved to Tufts College (now University) as President from 1915 to 1919.  He resigned from Tufts to pursue his interest in building or remodeling homes including a Philippine bungalow on Long Island Sound (constructed of Philippine lumber from the Philippine Hall at the St. Louis Exposition), an Italian villa in a Boston suburb and the King Caesar House in Duxbury, Mass.  Bumpus died in Pasadena, California in 1943.

While teaching at Brown, Bumpus spent his summers conducting research on the development of marine invertebrates at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he also served as assistant director from 1893 to 1895, and as director of the Biological Laboratory of the US Fish Commission.  In 1896 he presented the inaugural lecture in a summer seminar series at the Marine Biological Laboratory entitled “The variations and mutations of the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus”, which was published in 1898.

In that 1898 paper he was undoubtedly the first scientist to suggest that the introduction of house sparrows and their subsequent rapid spread across North America represented a huge experiment that could be used to study Darwinian natural selection.  Taking advantage of that natural experiment, he compared the size, shape and coloration of 868 sparrow eggs from Massachusetts with an equal number of sparrow eggs from England, to test the hypothesis that the rapid population growth of sparrows in North America would result in relaxed selection.  Without the benefit of statistical analysis—Francis Galton and Karl Pearson were just then developing some rudimentary statistical tests—he concluded from his graphs that eggs from Massachusetts were shorter and more variable in size and coloration than eggs from England.  He also raised the question of whether the observed differences were phenotypic (‘ontogenetic’) or adaptive (‘phylogenetic’) and suggested that a common garden experiment would be needed to differentiate between these alternatives.

Bumpus’s graph of the length of house sparrow eggs from North America (dotted line) and Europe (solid line) [1]

On 1 February 1898, a winter storm in Providence provided Bumpus with the material for another summer lecture at Woods Hole, which he then published.  After the storm, 136 immobilized sparrows were brought to Bumpus’s anatomy lab, where 72 subsequently revived but the remaining 64 died.  Bumpus identified the sex and measured nine morphological traits of each bird.  Bumpus concluded from his graphs that males survived better than females and that shorter, lighter birds with longer legs, wings and sternums and larger brain size (“skull width”) also survived better. He concluded that his analyses showed:

Natural selection is most destructive of those birds which have departed most from the ideal type, and its activity raises the general standard of excellence by favoring those birds which approach the structural ideal.

…the birds which perished have certain average structural peculiarities which distinguish them from the survivors, and that the intensity of selective elimination has been felt most by birds of extreme structure [2]

In his 1899 publication, the entire dataset is reproduced in an appendix, thereby permitting many other evolutionary biologists, as well as innumerable students in evolution classes, to analyze Bumpus’s data statistically.  Harris published the first  statistical analysis, and at least ten other papers have been published since then, including papers by John Calhoun, Peter Grant , Richard F. Johnston and colleagues, and one by Russell Lande and Steven Arnold.  Increasing complex and sophisticated statistical analyses were employed in these papers, and the conclusions of the various authors differ from those of Bumpus and from each other, in part due to the fact that many of the analyses use only subsets of the original data.

I do not know of another dataset of birds that has been subjected to so many analyses and so many different interpretations The history of reanalysis of Bumpus’s data is a nice example of a century of progress in both statistics and evolutionary biology

SOURCES

• Anderson TR (2006) Biology of the Ubiquitous House Sparrow, from Genes to Populations. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Bumpus HC (1898) The variations and mutations of the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus. Biological Lectures Delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Holl, 1896-1897, pp. 1-15.
• Bumpus HC (1899) The elimination of the unfit as illustrated by the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus. Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Holl, Mass. 1898, pp 209-228.
• Calhoun JB (1947) The role of temperature and natural selection in relation to the variations in size of the English sparrow in the United States. American Naturalist 81:203-228.
• Grant PR (1972) Centripetal selection and the house sparrow. Systematic Zoology 21:23-30.
• Harris JA (1911) A neglected paper on natural selection in the English sparrow. American Naturalist 45:314-319.
• Johnston RF, Niles DM, Rohwer SA (1972) Hermon Bumpus and natural selection in the house sparrow Passer domesticus. Evolution 26:20-31.
• Lande R, Arnold SJ (1983) The measurement of selection on correlated characters. Evolution 37:1210-1226.

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Footnotes

1. graph: Bumpus 1898 page 5
2. quotation: Bumpus 1899 pages 217 and 218

Birthday wishes

BY: Bob Montgomerie, Queen’s University | 12 February 2018

Mr Charles Darwin
Westminster Abbey
20 Deans Yd
Westminster
London SW1P 3PA
UK

My Dear Charles (if I may)

Happy 209^th birthday! 

I know that a few people have written to you [1] in the 132 years since you shuffled off this mortal coil, but I thought it high time we brought you up to date on the research inspired by those drab little finches that you collected in the Galápagos Islands. I am not really sure how long it takes for letters to reach you at your new address [2] but the current evidence suggests that it might take forever. But still…

You presumably know about the several Galápagos expeditions that took place during your lifetime. As soon as John Gould had figured out that there were actually 12 species of finches in your collection, and that there were different combinations of species on different islands, the floodgates were opened.

You will remember poor old Thomas Edmonstone [3] who went to the islands on HMS Herald in 1845. You had asked him specifically to collect finches from as many different islands as he could visit and to keep careful records as to which specimens were from which island, as you had not properly labelled all of your own finch specimens. Sadly, he died on that voyage and his records were virtually indecipherable.

Then Simeon Habel went out in 1868 and stayed for 6 months, making an extensive bird collection that ended up in Vienna. Percy Sclater and Osbert Salvin [4] published a little about that collection. Finally, your old nemesis, Luis Agassiz [5], went to the islands for only 9 days in 1873 but his crew still collected a lot of specimens for the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz, as you no doubt expected, could not see what all the fuss was about over the finches and remained a devout creationist.

It has always been pretty clear to me that the finches fascinated you. Even in your notes from the Beagle voyage you could already tell that they were closely related to some mainland species and realized that they were all related, even if, at the time, you thought that many of the finches on different islands were just morphologically differentiated races of the same species. As you said in your ‘Ornithological Notes‘:

These birds are closely allied in appearance to the Thenca of Chile or Callandra of la Plata. In their habits I cannot point out a single difference; — They are lively inquisitive, active run fast, frequent houses to pick the meat of the Tortoise, which is hung up, — sing tolerably well; are said to build a simple open nest. — are very tame, a character in common with the other birds…I have specimens from four of the larger Islands; the two above enumerated, and (female. Albermarle Isd.) & (male: James Isd). — The specimens from Chatham & Albermarle Isd appear to be the same; but the other two are different. In each Isld. each kind is exclusively found: habits of all are indistinguishable… When I see these Islands in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties. (Darwin 1963)

In 1888 and 1891, Zera L. Tanner took several naturalists (including Aggasiz’ son Alexander) on his fisheries research ship USFC Albatross to the islands to collect specimens. The bird specimens in those collections, as well those of Habel and Bauer and Adams in 1891, were studied by the great American ornithologist Robert Ridgway [6] and published in his Birds of the Galapagos Archipelago in 1896. Ridgway recognized that despite all of the previous visits to the islands, not much was really known about the finches still:

Not a single island of the group can be said to have been exhaustively explored, and few of the species are known in all their various phases in fact, many are known only from a few specimens in female or immature dress. No observations have been made upon the attitude the different species of Geospiza maintain toward one another tending to show how far the differences observable, or thought to be observable, in dried specimens indicate the actual grouping in species of living individuals. The anomaly of individuals adult as to plumage but with bills suggesting immaturity’, and of others which show exactly the reverse, remains to be explained and there are other questions which only protracted field-studies by a competent investigator can decide. Until all these present mysteries are solved, theories and generalizations are necessarily futile. (Ridgway 1897: 459-460)

Rollo Beck

The indefatigable Rollo Beck of California was the next ornithologist to make collections in the Galeapagos when he was sent there by Lord Walter Rothschild [7]  specifically to collect tortoises that were sent back to Rothschild’s collection at Tring (UK). Beck was sent back to the islands in 1905 to collect for the California Academy of Sciences, and stayed for a whole year. He shipped 78,000 specimens (including 8688 birds [8]) back to the Cal Academy, a third of which were finches.

Percy Lowe went out in 1936 but declared in his paper published in The Ibis that the finches were all a kind of hybrid swarm with no clear evidence of speciation. He did, however, call the birds ‘Darwin’s Finches’ and you will undoubtedly be delighted to know that that name endures to this day despite a few subsequent publications calling them ‘Galapagos Finches’.

In 1938-39, a school teacher named David Lack spent four months on the islands studying the behaviour of the fiches, followed by a few months studying the extensive collection of specimens at the Cal Academy. Lack was already a well-known, if amateur, ornithologist having participated in some ornithological expeditions and published a few papers. Lack was appointed Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in 1945, a position he held until he died in 1973. In 1940 he published the results of his Galápagos studies in a paper in Nature and later, in 1947, in a book called Darwin’s Finches. Lack really established the finches as model organisms for the study of evolution.

To some extent inspired by Lack’s book, Robert Bowman [9]—a Queen’s University graduate—went first went to the Galápagos in 1956 and returned several times to conduct a series of studies designed in part to show that Lack was mistaken about the role of competition in the evolution of the finches. Bob did his PhD at UC Berkeley, carefully describing the skulls and jaw musculature of the finches. Later he studied their songs and concluded that those species that coexisted in the same island differed as much in their songs as they did in their bills, and that the songs probably reduced the incidence of ‘cross-breeding’ as you called it.

Finally (though not actually the end of the story), a personal note. In the fall of 1973, my PhD advisor, Peter Grant, who was then studying competition in microtine rodents, came into our grad student office and asked me if I’d like to go to the Galápagos to suss out the finches as a possible focus for my thesis research. I had just started a PhD program at McGill University a couple of months earlier and was thinking then that I wanted to return to Newfoundland or the high arctic, as I had worked studying seabirds for the Canadian Wildlife Service in both places in the preceding summer. Peter and his postdoc Ian Abbott were going to the Galápagos for a few weeks mainly to study the interactions between the birds and the seeds of Tribulus, which formed a large part of their diet. For several reasons I declined, but Peter (with Ian and his wife, Lynette) went and was enchanted, thereby beginning the longest running—and today probably best known—series of studies of ‘your’ finches. His work was the subject of a Pulitzer prize winning book called The Beak of the Finch. I am certain that you would be stunned by the quality and breadth of the work that Peter, his wife Rosemary, and their students and colleagues have accomplished in the intervening 45 years.

I am actually in Ecuador today in the cloud forest nw of Quito, watching birds with a couple of old friends, Tim Birkhead (sperm competition [10], history of ornithology) and David McDonald (manakins). Tim and I will fly [11] to Baltra on Thursday the 15th to tour the islands for a few days. I will send you some photos and field notes next Monday from our trip. That post might be delayed by a day or two depending upon the quality of the internet connection [12] on our boat or in Guayaquil. I know you did not get to the mainland of Ecuador in 1835 but I think that history has shown that your time was better spent in the Galápagos.

Yr obd svt

Bob Montgomerie

Sources

• Darwin CR (1963) Ornithological notes. Barlow N. , editor. British Museum (Natural History) Bulletin, Historical Series 2: 201–278.
• Lack D (1947) Darwin’s Finches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
   

• Lowe PR(1936) XV.—The finches of the Galapagos in relation to Darwin’s conception of species. Ibis 78: 310–321, doi:10.1111/j.1474-919x.1936.tb03376.x
   

• Ridgway R (1897) Birds of the Galápagos archipelago. Proceedings of the U. S. Nayional Museum 19:459–670.
   

• Sclater PL, Salvin O (1870) Characters of new species of birds collected by Dr Habel in the Galapagos Islands. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 38:322–323.
   

• Ridgway R (1897) Birds of the Galápagos archipelago. Proceedings of the U. S. National Museum 19:459–670.
   

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FOOTNOTES

 

1. see photo at the top, but also, if you modern readers of this post are familiar with the what3words app or website, Darwin is at, or very close to, salsa.snap.finger

2. see for example a letter from Jerry Coyne on the Oxford Press blog in 2009 here; and a letter from Frank Gannon in EMBO Reports, also in 2009, here

3. 1825-1846; sometimes spelled Edmonston; he was accidentally shot in the head after landing in Peru, right after visiting the Galapagos 

4. Sclater (1829-1913) and Salvin (1835-1898) were both prominent 19^th century English ornithologists who were original members of the BOU and editors of The Ibis. Together they published the first paper to appear in The Ibis

5. Agassiz(1807-1873) was born and raised in Switzerland but moved to the USA in 1847 and eventually became professor of zoology at Harvard where he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

6. Ridgway (1850-1929) was one of the founders of the AOU (now AOS) and was president of the AOU from 1898-1900

7.  Rothschild (1868-1937) was a wealthy collector who donated his Tring estate to the British Museum, where it is now a division of the Natural History Museum and sold his bird specimens to the American Museum of Natural History, thereby establishing the AMNH as a leading ornithological centre worldwide.

8. About 2500 of these were finches in the genus Geospiza alone (data from VertNet accessed on 4 Feb 2018)

9. Bowman (1925-2006) first went to the islands as a grad student, then several more times during his long career as a professor at San Francisco State University until he retired in 1988.

10. It wasn’t until 1970 that Geoff Parker added this interesting way that males compete to your list of important mechanisms of selection.

11. I don’t know if you are aware that we humans can now fly from place to place in giant buses with wings called airplanes, making it possible to get from my home in Canada to the Galápagos in less than a day. The first airplane flew to the Galapagos in 1934 to rescue a naturalist who had contracted appendicitis.

12. I don’t even know where to start explaining this. It’s like the mail without the paper, and messages are transferred instantly (which is both a boon and a curse) across the ether, so you are actually likely to encounter them wherever you are.