Author
I have been fortunate to have been a professional ornithologist throughout my career, studying the behaviour, ecology, evolution and anatomy of birds. My interest in the history of ornithology started a long time ago while I was doing my PhD and had regular access to one of the best ornithological libraries in the world. I loved going through the old books to see what previous researchers had discovered, particularly with respect to my own field of research – promiscuity in birds.
(View Tim’s University webpage)
Then about fifteen years ago a friend at work told me how his wife who was writing a history of their parish had come across a letter from the 1700s in which the writer described shooting a `scallop-toed sandpiper´ and a `chatterer´ just outside Sheffield. He asked me if I could tell him what species these were. I couldn´t for the simple reason that I had never heard of them. But I was intrigued. There was no Internet then and the only thing I could do was check the handful of books I had in my own library, but with no success. Identifying these two species became a mini-obsession and over the following months the more I searched the more I realised what a rich and untapped seam of information the history of ornithology was.
My first attempt to embrace the history of ornithology was the story of the red canary – how, starting in the 1400s cage-bird enthusiasts transformed the wild canary from a greenish bird into a pure yellow one, and later in the twentieth century into a red one through some simple but effective genetic engineering.
Writing The Red Canary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2003) had been an extracurricular activity and I had just finished it when I was asked to review a grant application for a funding body known as the Leverhulme Trust. I had heard of the Trust but was unfamiliar with their remit. When I read it, I was horrified to see that my red canary project was the kind of study they might have funded. I quickly realised that I could still apply for one of their grants, building on the red canary experience and the accumulated knowledge, to write a broader history of ornithology.
As writers know, research for a book is spectacularly inefficient, and one uses only a fraction of all the information accumulated. As a result, I had a large amount of left-over´ information from The Red Canary and (naively) assumed it would be relatively easy to add to it and produce another book on the history of ornithology.
I wrote an application and was successful. The Leverhulme Trust grant allowed me to employ a research assistant and to cover the cost of travelling to libraries and private collections. Finding an assistant with the right combination of talents was tricky: I needed someone interested in birds, in history and the ability to read several different European languages: Dr Bas van Balen from the Netherlands fitted the bill, and we worked together on the project for three years.
