Читать книгу Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk - Austin Loomer Rand - Страница 3

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In looking back over the preparation of these sketches I feel as though each evening I'd gathered up the bits and pieces left over from the day's work and fashioned them into designs for my own amusement and the edification of my family. Truly it's as though I'd used stray feathers, fallen from the bird skins I'd handled, and fitted them together into something of wider interest than the original.

Much of my work now is museum research, working with bird specimens and books. In fashioning a research paper I always amass a great deal more material, that is to say, information and ideas, than I am able to use in it. In place of a lumber room I have a set of files with index headings that range from Abundance and Age, through such headings as Beauty, Feathering of Feet, Fictitious, Hysteria, Pterylography, Social, Song, Tail Feathers, Valentine's Day, to Zoogeography. Here I put the information that is irrelevant at the moment but too interesting to discard. Its source is varied. Some has been accumulated while studying specimens from localities as geographically separated as Alaska, El Salvador, Gabon, Tristan da Cunha, Nepal, Negros, and New Guinea; and while writing papers that range from describing new species to discussing secondary sexual characters and ecological competition. Some have been recorded while in the field on expeditions, trips that ranged from two years in Madagascar, three expeditions in New Guinea, and a season in the Philippines to trips nearer home from the Yukon to Nova Scotia, Florida, and Central America.

Gradually information builds up under each heading, and new ones are added. These items are too interesting to remain buried in the files. They are things people want to know about. So I began to draft them into articles for publication in the museum's monthly, The Chicago Natural History Museum Bulletin. The response was gratifying. The press picked them up and reprinted them. One was used in a Chicago Tribune editorial. Several were used in commercial radio programs. Encouraged, I prepared more, soon overrunning the space available in the bulletin.

Most scientific papers are not written to be read for enjoyment. Conciseness as well as clarity are striven for, conveying certain information in a small compass. The correlations made are often obscure ones, appreciated only by scientists. Yet the material they contain is often intensely interesting, and if these papers were written in a more leisurely style, with more general correlations pointed out, they would provide both interesting and entertaining reading. In a few cases my own research falls in this class, and I've rewritten some of my own papers with this in mind (see "Battle of the Sexes and Its Evolutionary Significance").

This collection of articles, if it were a painting, could be called a conversation piece. Or it might be compared to a well-filled whatnot. Each of the sixty chapters is an independent unit, illustrating some facet of birds, their behavior, or our study of them. Some of the facts may seem unusual or bizarre, but most of them are well known and well documented. The thing that is new, if there is anything new, is the setting in which I've placed them, the manner in which I've looked at them. Taken as a whole, they touch on many different birds from many different places in their less widely known aspects, and with a human interest slant.

"But what will your professional colleagues say?" asked a friend as he flipped through the cartoons. "These pictures don't approach the subject in a very serious manner." Quite true. But a discipline must be very lightly rooted indeed if it can't stand a few caricatures and cartoons and perhaps be the better for them.

The knowledge of most people about the hornbills of tropical Africa, the gulls of Australia, the penguins of Antarctica, and the crocodile birds of the Nile is probably pretty vague. To give a frame of reference in a biological sense is impractical in the compass of one slim volume.

But a ready-made frame of reference already exists: the parallels in bird and in human. These I have used. But in so doing I am not imputing human motives and attributes to birds. The actions are similar. The workings of the human mind I understand only vaguely; that of the bird I can study only through the actions of the birds. One set of behavior may be learned and rational, one rigidly innate, entirely instinctive, and inherited, or at most modified by experience. Be that as it may, the similarity in the end result in two such different vertebrate animals as man and bird when faced with similar problems is often close. Perhaps it is because the solutions are necessarily few; perhaps, and I incline to this feeling, it helps illustrate one aspect of the close relationship between all animate nature.

This series of articles is intended to be interesting and entertaining. I hope it will also make more people aware of the many ways birds act, here and in far places, how they have solved their problems and profited by their opportunities.