Research
The research for this book involved many library visits and lots of reading. It quickly became apparent that while several people knew of the existence of old bird books, few had bothered to see what they said. As a result there were plenty of surprises – in particular, I was thrilled to find that people that kept cage birds often knew much more about birds than those that claimed to be experts. Sadly, many of the early bird-keeping books were published anonymously making it impossible to give anyone the credit for particular discoveries.
An exciting discovery I made during the research for The Wisdom of Birds was finding an unpublished manuscript of a French encyclopaedia of ornithology Traitté General des Oyseaux by Jean-Baptiste Faultrier (1660). Intended as a gift for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV´s minister of finance, Faultrier´s encyclopaedia disappeared when Fouquet was clapped in prison on what was probably a trumped-up charge of fraud in 1661. Somehow the manuscript ended up in Lord Derby´s library at Knowsley Hall, where I found it in 2004 (Birkhead et al., 2006 Archives of Natural History 33: 109-134). Subsequent analysis by Isabelle Charmantier revealed Faultrier´s manuscript to be a significant landmark in the history of ornithology (Charmantier, Greengrass and Birkhead, Archives of Natural History 35:319-338 – available on line).
One of the real joys of writing a book is the way it generates new friends, new experiences and new discoveries. After I had visited Lord and Lady Middleton to photograph the portrait of their ancestor Francis Willughby, Lord Middleton suggested I take a look at the Willoughby (sic) Collection that his father had placed on loan at Nottingham University Library (see Raven 1942 John Ray. Cambridge University Press. Pp 338).
I went, accompanied by Isabelle Charmantier to look at the artwork allegedly purchased by Francis Willughby in 1663 in Nuremberg when he and Ray were touring Europe collecting material for their ornithological encyclopaedia The Ornithology of Francis Willughby (1676 and 1678). Perhaps the most striking image in the Nottingham collection is one we recognised as a female pintailed sandgrouse Pterocles alchata. Inscribed on the painting in John Ray´s hand, are the lines: `This Bird is I suppose the same as that figured & described by Olina under ye title of Francolino though ye colours differ being corrupted by the paintor to make the Bird show more beautiful´. In other words, Ray thought that this bird was a badly coloured `Francolino´ or hazel grouse Bonasa bonasia, and as a result did not include it in the Ornithology. To add further confusion, Ray had named the bird `Jangle´ on the painting.
Intrigued, Isabelle and I decided to dig a little deeper. It is hardly surprising that the early ornithologists found sandgrouse difficult to identify – they look like a cross between a grouse and a pigeon. Indeed, one of Ray and Willughby´s predecessors, Conrad Gessner placed the sandgrouse among the pigeons in his encyclopaedia of birds of 1555. The name `Jangle´ it turns out is onomatopoeic, imitating the birds´ call, and a corruption of `angel´. Another ornithological contemporary of Ray and Willughby was Walter Charleton, whose book on birds Onomasticon (1668) Ray did not rate, and probably did not look at it very closely. Had he done so, he would undoubtedly have been struck by the similarity of Charleton´s image of the `angel´ and the one he had annotated. Charleton had obtained most of the images for his book from Sir Thomas Crew. Ray actually knew this, and in a letter to Tancred Robinson says, Charleton´s `figures of birds … were taken most from Sir Tho. Crew´s designs drawn at Montpellier which I saw there; which were by no means exact according to the life, but humoured by the painter to make them more beautiful´. Then, in a letter to Martin Lister in 1668 Ray, referring to `the francolino´ says: `I think this bird is the same as that whose picture Mr Thomas Crew showed us at Montpellier´ (Raven 1942: 316). Thus, Willughby´s `angel´ is almost certainly Thomas Crew´s painting of a pintailed sandgrouse, acquired when Ray visited him in Montpellier in 1665 (see Charmantier & Birkhead (2008) J. Ornithology 149: 469-472).
Another long-standing mystery concerned the unknown bird positioned in the middle of plate XIIII of Ray’s Ornithology (below left) that appears to have an extra eye on its bill. The image is from Georg Marcgrave’s Historia Naturalis Brasilae (1648), and is identical to that in Ray’s Ornithology. The mystery was solved when I tracked the image down to the original water-colour painting on which the Marcgrave engraving was based, where it is clear that the bird is a lesser nighthawk Chordeiles acutipennis with a wide open gape and the ‘extra eye’ is in fact the pharyx. Little wonder that both Marcgrave’s and Ray’s engravers were confused!
