A Concise History of Ornithology.—Michael Walters. 2003. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. 255 pp., 75 illustrations. ISBN 0-300-09073-0. $30.00 (cloth).

History serves us best when it can instruct us in the most thoughtful, efficient, artful, or practical ways to act in the present, and can serve as a lodestar for future practice and thought. “What is past is prologue,” notes the inscription carved on the front of the National Archives building in Washington, DC, which is in turn a quote from Hamlet. The modern study of ornithology is built upon the foundation of careful work in decades and centuries past, and even the missteps of naturalists and scientists have usually taught ornithologists a great deal.

This compact book provides a necessarily brief— although in a few cases, somewhat hasty—overview of a long and complex subject spanning centuries. It's meant to be what its title implies—concise—but it provides generally excellent service. Because it is primarily narrative rather than analytical, this particular history book will probably not solve any specific problems for ornithologists, but it will certainly guide those willing to dig deeply into a much richer literature.

Michael Walters, Curator of the Bird Group in the Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum at Tring in the UK, details what he considers the notable aspects of the history of ornithology knowledgeably and usually with a deft hand. Despite a steady stream of dates and names, the text is clear, crisp, and accessible. The illustrations—all in black and white—are all taken from the exceptional visual resources in London's Natural History Museum.

The book is organized into ten chapters, ranging from the earliest Chinese and Greek history up through the twentieth century, with a large number of Appendices rounding out the work. Walters has aimed the book towards an educated lay audience, and it works nicely for the scientist or generalist interested in history but with no specialized knowledge of ornithology, as well as for the ornithologist with a deeper interest in history. Walters also presupposes no particular specialized vocabulary, which is a nice relief for the general reader.

In creating this work, Walters has conducted an admirable amount of sometimes original, and often deep, research in primary and secondary sources; it is far more than a regurgitation of well-known historical factoids. For example, one of the wonderful contributions of this book is its untangling of the interrelated history of taxonomic and nomenclatural change. Because these changes before, during, and after Linnaeus' time were very important in dictating how ornithologists organized and described birds, the history of nomenclatural development and transformation can shed a great deal of light on how modern taxa were formed.

It is people who have made ornithology the subject that it is, and it is the people who are the most interesting aspect of this book. Many led fascinating lives, and Walters painstakingly traces their connections to each other and their works. What Walters includes in the book is generally more important that what he has left out. He has done ornithologists and historians alike, a great favor by getting the details correct— small but important facts that are often incorrectly cited in a number of reference sources, or which are rarely seen in print. For instance, in his brief section on the important but under-recognized Robert Ridgway, Walters correctly notes a number of quite obscure details, none of which are available in a single source: that Ridgway was almost ridiculously loyal to Spencer Fullerton Baird and the Smithsonian, turning down a lucrative position at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) which paid nearly three times what he was making in Washington; that he was only sixteen years old (and not seventeen as is often stated) when he began service as the ornithologist on Clarence King's Survey of the Fortieth Parallel between 1867 and 1869; and that he privately published some 5000 copies of his Color Standards and Color Nomenclature in 1912, with his wife wrapping and mailing almost every copy herself. The pain and sacrifice of the undertaking doesn't come through in Walter's book, however. Ridgway, who was nearly financially ruined by the task, noted in a letter to his brother six years after publication that “that miserable color book has proven a veritable disaster, for it has involved me in difficulties that I may never be able to surmount” (unpublished letter from Robert Ridgway to John L. Ridgway, 26 August 1918, Blacker-Wood Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada).

The book's biggest shortcoming—and it doesn't have many—is its relative lack of attention to the vital period between the middle of the nineteenth century to the recent past. Only a scant sixteen pages are dedicated to the nineteenth century, and even fewer—a dozen pages—are given over to ornithology and ornithologists in the twentieth century. It is this era that is likely to be of the greatest interest to practicing ornithologists because of the increasing relevance and recognizability of the work being done. After John James Audubon died, a new era of work in systematics and institutionalized ornithology sprung up under the auspices of men like the Smithsonian's Spencer Fullerton Baird, the AMNH's Joel Allen, and others. The last quarter of the nineteenth century alone encompassed the formation of the American Ornithologists' Union, the initial uses of trinomials and all that they implied about evolution, and the powerful influence of Charles Darwin's writings upon scientific thought. Walters touches on all of these subjects, but in a short book a little information goes a long way, and an additional ten pages given over to this vital era would have solidified this book's position as an outstanding historical chronology. In his defense, though, Walker's treatment of these subjects, particularly trinomials, is excellent and provides a model of brevity and clarity.

One other complaint is that the book covers relatively little of some key conflicts and difficulties which have been central in defining ornithology during many of the decades of the past two or three centuries: the sometimes bitter struggles between amateurs and professionals; the disdain felt by nineteenth-century ornithologists for those from the previous centuries as they struggled to gain professional status; and the dismissal at times by twentieth-century ornithologists of their nineteenth-century counterparts. The very real dangers—sometimes fatal—faced by ornithologists in the field also receive little attention.

Somewhat inexplicably, the final chapter, “Ornithology and Ornithologists in the Twentieth Century,” is authored by someone else—John Coulson. Currently the editor of Waterbirds, Coulson is a distinguished scientist and the immediate past Editor-in-Chief of The Ibis. His writing style blends in reasonably well, but the book contains no explanation as to why he, and not Walters, authored this chapter, although Coulson's byline is prominent at the start of the chapter and in the table of contents.

Finally, the end matter in the book—which at eighty pages takes up nearly a third of the volume—is exceptionally useful for historians of ornithology. It contains a whopping thirty-two separate Appendices, which note the names used by many of the important ornithologists in the era before nomenclature stabilized. One of its greatest uses for those interested in the history of ornithology is its treatment of historic synonymies, not just at the species level but for higher taxonomic categories as well. The bibliography is also excellent and will provide great service to those wishing to read further about the people and events Walters recounts.