A Common Chiffchaff singing at the top of Newtonhill Road this morning. Bet it's gone by tomorrow.
Tuesday 19th May 09
.. it's gone.
I was on a retreat... don't ask. In Old Aberdeen, next to this.
Little known fact... the great ornithologist William Macgillivray (see here), contemporary and friend of Audubon, author of a great 5 volume History of British Birds (Vol I, 1837), lover of long walks through the countryside accompanied by young boys, lived in the University of Aberdeen Conference and Events Office.
MacGillivray has got a bum deal from history - the first person to be really describing birds in detail as they were, on this side of the World. But he was eventually scooped, at least in popular imagination, by the better connected, toned and tanned, William Yarrell, who also published the first volume of his History of British Birds in 1837. Yarrell's book was an easier read, but not as good on the descriptions, of birds OR young boys.
William Macgillivray - sorrowful loser in the Battle of the Bills, we salute you.
3 comments:
I was confused by your blog entry’s repeating the term “young boys” and using “bum deal” I thought McGillivray was the 19th century Scottish version of the Christian Brothers. But in reading some of his work I think he was the anti-Christian Brothers:
“We are all school boys, or at least scholars and when we forget that we are so, we become fools. …Let us ever retain our schoolboy feelings, so long as they are innocent. There is a freshness of heart manifest in every real lover of Nature—a delightful feeling, gratifying not to one’s self only, but to his companions. When it is gone and the frost of worldly wisdom has chilled the affections, the naturalist becomes a pompous, pedantic, stiff-necked, cold-blooded thing from which you shrink back unwittingly.
…I have seen him (Audubon) chasing tom-tits with all the glee of a truant school-boy, and have heard him communicate his knowledge with the fervour and feeling of a warm-hearted soul as he is.” (British Birds vol 1, p. 239)
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/30536 . Pp. 147-148.
"The MacGillivray's Warbler was named by John James Audubon in honor of Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray, although the proper credit to its discovery goes to John Kirk Townsend."
Well...Townsend got a warbler & a solitaire out of it...so he really can't complain too much.
On a slightly more frivolous note, I just read this news story and thought of you:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8092921.stm
Post a Comment