Book
As I researched The Red Canary I became aware of how important bird-keeping had been in the development of ornithology. The scientific study of birds had its roots very firmly in the catching and keeping of birds. The other thing I realised was that the bird-keeping literature had been largely ignored. One or two individuals, notably Juergen Haffer in Germany and Paul Farber in the USA had drawn attention to the fact that no-one had properly evaluated the role of bird-keeping in the development of ornithology. It seemed like a perfect project.
It also sounded straightforward, but as I started reading, it soon became clear that to put bird-keeping into perspective I would have to know about the entire history of ornithology – which is vast! The entire project took about six years, from getting the grant to getting the book to publication. It involved lots of reading, lots of translation (by Bas), but was immensely rewarding. I visited public and private libraries in Europe and North America and found librarians almost invariably helpful and enthusiastic. The internet was useful too, and the amount of historical material on the web is now much greater than when I started.
The main focus of the book is to answer the question of where our knowledge of birds comes from. We take it for granted now that birds like the cuckoo and swallow are migrants, spending the winter in warmer countries, but when was that discovered? When did we abandon the idea that they spent the winter naked, tucked away in holes in trees or in the mud at the bottom of ponds?
The book´s title, comes from my main character, John Ray, who to my mind (and as I hope to demonstrate in the book) was the most important ornithologist ever. His ‘The Wisdom of God’ (1691) is extraordinary for its biological insight and an important forerunner of Darwin´s Origin of Species (1859).
The Wisdom of Birds is arranged around a bird´s life cycle. Starting with fertilisation, we see how the young bird develops and grows up, acquiring as it does so, a territory and a partner. We explore the notion of pair bonds, infidelity, migration and lifespan. Each chapter looks at how we discovered what we know, how we ditched erroneous ideas and, by looking at contemporary research, consider our current state of knowledge. One of the most striking discoveries is that many of the ideas we currently think of as new had already been anticipated long before – the pity is we weren´t primed to take advantage of them. One of my objectives in writing Wisdom was to raise awareness of the enormous potential of ornithology´s history.
