A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon

  • Mark V. Barrow
Princeton University Press: 1998. pp 326 $39.50, £24.95
Atlantic puffins, from Audubon's Birds of America: the starting point for American ornithology. Credit: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

Because they are ubiquitous, variable in shape and behaviour, and easy to study, birds engage our curiosity and provide an extraordinary window onto how nature works. They have been subjects of both human passion and rigorous scientific investigation for centuries, yielding founding principles in ecology, evolutionary biology, population biology, animal behaviour and conservation sciences.

In the United States these fields emerged almost simultaneously around 1900, as the age of exploration and description gave way to more process-oriented inquiry. In Mark Barrow's A Passion for Birds we experience this transition in science through the lives and letters of individuals long revered as the fathers of American ornithology (a few mothers also appear, very late). The result is at once copiously footnoted history and lively drama, complete with colourful characters, harrowing escapes, class struggles and personal triumphs.

Barrow exposes a rich portrait of human strength, frailty and ego in the transformation of a popular ninteenth-century hobby into first a scientific discipline and ultimately an influential mainstream profession. Moreover, because of the unique passions that birds elicit in humans, ornithology has long been a field in which the lay citizen plays a large role. Thus, Barrow also exposes a spectacular example of science and popular culture being inextricably — if sometimes unwillingly — bound together. Tensions produced by this nexus provide pertinent reading a century later in light of the burgeoning role of ‘citizen-scientists’ in ornithology today.

The story opens with vivid accounts of the post-Audubon fascination with bird collecting among pioneer naturalists. The plot is thickest between 1883, when the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) was founded, and 1930, when an ageing aristocracy of museum-bound ornithologists lost clout as university scientists focused increasingly on the living bird. Barrow concludes with homage to a young immigrant from Germany who struggled during the 1930s to reform the AOU against a senescent and narrow-minded élite. Ernst Mayr, always a champion of the amateur naturalist in ornithology, would become America's most influential professional in the field.

Barrow interweaves several subplots into the emergence of an interdisciplinary science from a field dominated by taxonomists. One explores the profound yet schizoid role played by American ornithologists in the movement to protect nature. It seems curious today that a venerable and staunchly scientific body (the AOU) and an equally venerable body of conservation activists (the Audubon Society) were conceived by the same individuals at exactly the same time. No sooner did the two organizations emerge than they parted company. It took a group of Boston society women outraged by the slaughter of birds for hat plumes to breathe activism into Audubon. In contrast, after early triumphs, the AOU's role in bird conservation became detached and muted, and struggles to define itself even today.

Engagement of the AOU in bird protection waned partly because of public concern over bird collecting, an activity that many scientists viewed as the lifeblood of ornithology. Ironically, this discipline, launched mainly by interested amateurs, then distanced itself from those very amateurs who had begun to watch birds, even as the pastime gave rise to new scientific opportunities. Tensions and emotions run high to this day over the issue of scientific collecting. Borne out of the human passions that birds elicit, debate still rages within both professional and amateur ornithology. Modern zealots on both sides should read Barrow's accounts of this century-old argument with care. Unfortunately, his unflattering treatment of scientists who steadfastly defended the importance of collecting voucher specimens reveals an underlying bias that colours many passages in this book.

A related subplot spotlights the rise to power, decades of control and ultimate obsolescence of a small band of men who established and narrowly defined American ornithology for a generation. Museums provided the first bastion of the profession, but they fostered such a fortress mentality among the practitioners that the very structure of the AOU was built to exclude new blood from a small inner sanctum. Still reflecting a profound desire among professionals to distinguish themselves from growing throngs of amateurs, remnants of this class system are only today breaking down within the AOU.

As an American scientist with — yes — a passion for birds, I was gripped from cover to cover by this book and gained enormous insight into my roots. Scientists and historians of science on both sides of the Atlantic will appreciate this illuminating case history of the human side of a profession's origins.