I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge.
Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was astonishingly primitive. For example, students did not even agree that birds migrated. Perhaps, as Aristotle had suggested, they hid in holes during the winter. Perhaps they transmuted from a species that departed to a species that arrived. With no observers in southern lands and no rapid communication, it's not surprising that it was hard to imagine that birds flew south in the fall and returned in the spring. Even now, when all is revealed, migration still seems, at least to me, to be mysterious, miraculous, and wondrously improbable.
Before the "new philosophy put all in doubt," the assumption that governed all "science" was that the natural world should be studied for evidence of divine wisdom -- a practice which blinkered understanding and limited speculation. The questions that people asked about birds were therefore not particularly challenging. They asked which ones were good to eat, which ones could be kept in cages, and which ones had medicinal value.
The first task of new ornithology was simply to take a census. What birds live here, by what names are they called, and how should they be classified? In the non-standardized late medieval world, most birds bore regional or demotic names, and sometimes the same name was attached two or more species of birds. It took a while before the ars-foot came to be recognized and conventionalized as the great-crested grebe and to earn the official designation Podiceps cristatus. It was the same with the such regionally-named birds as the annet, bald buzzard, the Bohemian chatterer, the copped douker, the coulterneb, the didapper, the dun-diver, the fern-owl, the flusher, the gid, the glead, the gorcock, the ox-eye, the pickmire, the puit, the puttock, the pyrag, the rock ouzel, the scarf, the skout, and the witwall? It remained to be demonstrated that the "yarwhelp" "was in fact the East Anglian name for the bar-tailed godwit and was to be distinguished from the similar black-tailed godwit." That the sea-pie was an oystercatcher. That the elegug was a guillemot. "The sea-swallows they there (on Caldey Island) call spurs, and the razor-bills are called elegugus.... This name elelgug some attribute to the puffin, and some to the guillem[ot]; indeed they know not what they mean by this name." Nomenclature was a thicket.
Willoughby was an energetic surveyor and classifier. But as he became more familiar with bird life, he started to ask questions of genuine scientific interest. What is the function of the tomial tooth? Do all birds of the same species have the same color iris? How many birds have rictal bristles? Do birds who lay two eggs produce one male and one female? Do female birds ever have two ovaries and two oviducts? Can birds hold on to their eggs at will, or are they laid involuntarily? How do birds survive the cold of winter? Why do birds molt?
While these are not necessarily the questions of a modern ornithologist, they certainly represent a new beginning. Many thanks to Birkhead for bringing Willoughby to our attention.
How sad that the first true ornithologist died at age thirty-six.
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