PROGRAMME for 2010

16 March – Birds of the Comoros Islands by Dr Julian Hume.  Dr Hume is a research associate of the Natural History Museum and is currently working on fossil birds of the south-west Indian Ocean.

27 April – AGM (speaker to be announced).

22 June – speaker to be announced.

21 September – speaker to be announced.

2 November – Bird distribution in Arabia by Michael Jennings.

The Club holds about six evening meetings a year, usually in London. An address by a speaker, usually one with an international reputation in fieldwork, exploration or a specialist knowledge of an ornithological subject, is preceded by drinks and an informal supper, giving members an opportunity to meet each other and to contribute to the discussion and questions which follow the talk.

Dr Nigel Collar talking to the club about Birds and People in 2008.

Overseas Members visiting Britain are especially welcome at these meetings, and the Hon. Secretary would be very pleased to hear from anyone who can offer to talk to the Club, giving as much advance notice as possible - please contact: Tony Statham, Ashlyns Lodge, Chesham Road, Berkhamsted, Herts. HP4 2ST, UK or Email: Honorary Secretary

Meetings are normally held on the ground floor of the Sherfield Building of Imperial College, South Kensington, London, SW7. This suite is now called the Tower Rooms and meetings will take place in Section C with the entrance opposite the Queen’s Tower in the main quadrangle. The nearest Tube station is at South Kensington; a map of the area will be sent to members, on request. (Limited car parking facilities can be reserved, [at a special reduced charge of £5.00], on prior application to the Honorary Secretary). The cash bar is open from 6.15 pm, and a buffet supper, of two courses followed by coffee, is served at 7.00 pm. (A vegetarian menu can be arranged if ordered at the time of booking). Dinner charges are £22.50. Informal talks are given on completion, commencing at about 8.00 pm. Overseas Members are especially welcome.

Recent meetings:

29 April 2009: The Worst Journey in the World: an Ornithological Tale of Bravery and Endurance - Douglas Russell

After dinner, Douglas Russell, a curator in the Bird Group, (The Natural History Museum, Tring) gave a talk titled “The Worst Journey in the World: an Ornithological Tale of Bravery and Endurance”. He prefaced his talk with the following quotation from Robert Falcon Scott's Diary, at Cape Evans, 1911: - ‘To me, and to every one who has remained here the result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination, as one of the most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.’

10 March 2009: Ornithological Exploration in the Colombian Andes - Thomas Donegan

Thomas Donegan's talk focused on recent ornithological research in Serrania de los Yariguies, Santander, in the East Andes of Colombia.  From 2003-2006, he and others studied birds and other taxonomic groups of this previously unstudied and largely pristine mountain range.  Photographs of many of the 546 species recorded in the Yariguies mountains were shown, together with some sound recordings.

As has been detailed in recent papers in the Bulletin and elsewhere, studies in the Yariguies mountains have resulted in a number of findings, including over a hundred significant distributional records.  In addition, various bird taxa new to science, such as the brush-finch Atlapetes latinuchus yariguierum, the antpitta Grallaricula nana hallsi and the tapaculo Scytalopus griseicollis gilesi were discovered. Photographs of yet-to-be-described new bird taxa in the genera Anisognathus, Schizoeaca and Scytalopus were also shown.

Thirteen threatened bird species were found in the Yariguies mountains and surrounding foothills and lowlands, including, at the time, one of the world's largest concentrations of Critically Endangered terrestrial bird species.  Several of these species have been downgraded in threat category following the discovery of healthy populations in the Yariguíes mountains.  Importantly, following this fieldwork, the region was declared a national park and two nature reserves have been established by ProAves in the region, which gives great hope for conservation.

The Yariguies mountains represent a previously unknown centre of avian endemism.  In several high elevation taxonomic groups studied, a three-way split of subspecifically or specifically distinct populations is revealed in the East Andes of Colombia: (i) main / southern East Andes; (ii) northern East Andes (Tamá) and (iii) Yariguies.  These population centres are mutually isolated by depressions (lower elevation parts) of the East Andes and dryer valleys.  As a general rule, the Yariguies populations are darker in plumage than others, which may be linked to higher levels of precipitation in the region.

Subspecies and species limits were discussed in the context of the various descriptions of new bird taxa from the Yariguíes.  Thomas noted that several of the new ‘subspecies’ described from the Yariguies would be regarded as species using liberal concepts such as those employed by the BOU for its British list.  However, sympatric species in the genera studied show greater inter-specific differences between them than the various new Yariguies bird taxa do from geographically proximate populations.  As a result, subspecies treatment would seem a more appropriate for such populations.

4 November: The Special birds of Morocco - Richard Price

After dinner, Richard Price gave an interesting talk with some excellent photographs on the birds of Morocco. He presented his talk on the endemic species, and sub-species which may be pronounced to be new species, in Morocco.  His many photographs of the birds were set in the dramatically beautiful and varied habitats, including snowy mountains, different types of desert, juniper and cedar woodland, wetlands and the coast.  The first were the iconic Crimson-winged Finches Rhodopechys sanguinea with Atlas Horned Lark Eremophila alpestris and Seebohm's Wheatear in the Atlas Mountains, and the elusive Levaillant's Woodpecker Picus vaillantii and Atlas Pied Wagtail Moticilla alba subpersonata of the mountain rivers.  Tristram's Warbler Sylvia deserticola is endemic to the Maghreb, frequenting high hillside juniper bushes.

Counting Seebohm's as a species, there are eight species of wheatear in Morocco.  The scarcest is Mourning Wheatear Oenanthe lugens and the most beautiful Red-rumped Wheatear Oenanthe moesta. There are 14 species of lark, of which Thick-billed Lark Ramphocoris clotbey is the most extraordinary and Hoopoe Lark Alaemon alaudipes the most elegant having a spectacular "kamikaze" song flight.  Temminck's Lark Eremophila bilopha was illustrated doing its leaning distraction display and others of note included Bar-tailed Desert Lark Ammomanes cincturus.

Desert Sparrow Passer simplex is a declining species but still to be found where there are resident or regular camels.  Desert Warbler Sylvia nana and Scrub Warbler Scotocerca inquieta are widespread but require early morning starts.  The reduced and still reducing numbers of birds of prey are in sad and stark contrast to those in neighbouring Spain.  Vultures are virtually extinct.  Bonelli's Hieraaetus fasciatus is the most likely eagle to be seen.  Long-legged Buzzard Buteo rufinus is widespread but thinning and all this is probably due to poisoned carcasses put out to kill wild dogs.  Lanner Falcons Falco biarmicus are widely encountered in the deserts, Peregrines Falco peregrinus are local, as are Barbary Falcons Falco pelegrinoides.

Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters Merops persicus have just two outposts at the northwestern extremity of their range. Other spectacular species are the reclusive and nomadic Houbara Bustard Chlamydotis undulata game-keepered by Middle-Eastern Arabs and the smaller, pale Desert Eagle or Pharaoh Owl Bubo bubo ascalaphus.

Possible new endemic species are the Atlas Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs africana, which is boldly coloured and has a green back instead of a beige one, the Blue Tit Parus caeruleus ultramarinus which has a dark blue crown instead of a powder blue one, and the very dark male Stonechat Saxicola torquata.  Then there is the special Magpie Pica pica mauritanica, which is slightly smaller than the well-known and widespread form, having a distinctive patch of turquoise skin behind the eye. Along the southern coastal fringe is the Tchagra or Black-crowned Bush Shrike Tchagra senegala which is at the northern end of its range and a likely separate species, the white-breasted Moroccan Cormorant Phalacorax carbo maroccanus.

23 September: New Zealand’s moa: biology and extinction of the world’s strangest birds - Dr Sam Turvey.

New Zealand, the world’s most isolated major landmass, contained a diverse endemic avifauna (c. 245 species) before the arrival of humans around 750 years ago, which included an extraordinary evolutionary radiation of large-bodied ratites known as moa. First described by Richard Owen in 1839 on the basis of an incomplete femur, subfossil remains of these giant birds were found to be common in Quaternary swamp sites, dunes and caves. Ten moa species in six genera and two families are recognised today, including two species of giant moa Dinornis, among the largest birds ever to have evolved. Dinornis also displayed extreme levels of female-biased sexual size dimorphism, representing the largest sexual size dimorphism of any terrestrial vertebrate. The unfossilised state of many moa remains led nineteenth century researchers to speculate that moa might still survive in remote regions of New Zealand, but the otherwise rich Maori oral traditions contain little meaningful information on moa, and archaeological evidence, radiocarbon dating and mathematical modelling suggest that all moa species died out within c. 100 years of Maori arrival. There is extensive evidence of moa hunting by early Maori settlers, with an estimated 100,000-500,000 moa individuals represented in known archaeological moa-hunting sites, and with evidence of preferential targeting of moa compared to other bird species. Discovery of cyclical growth marks in moa long bones, a feature unknown in living birds, indicates that moa took several years even to reach adult body size, and showed a hugely exaggerated K-selected life-history strategy that evolved in the absence of mammalian predators in the pre-human New Zealand ecosystem. This would also have left moa extremely vulnerable to exploitation by early settlers.

8 July: Fancy that: pigeons, finches, chickens and the Origin of Species

Joanne H. Cooper of the Bird Group, Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, Tring addressed the club after dinner:

On the evening of 1st July 1858, at the Linnaean Society in London, the scientific world was changed forever by the reading of two papers on natural selection by Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.  Taking place exactly a week after the 150th anniversary of the great event, this occasion presented the ideal opportunity to celebrate Darwin and the ornithological research that played a crucial role in the formation of his theory.

Popular myth still frequently credits the Galapagos finches, with their diversity of beak shapes and sizes, as Darwin’s ‘Eureka!’ inspiration during the Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836).   While it is true that Darwin did gain an inspirational insight from the birds of the Galapagos, it was the archipelago’s mockingbirds that provided it.  Although this key point has been widely noted in ornithological and scientific literature, it is only just beginning to sink into popular culture.  Darwin’s critical observation was that on each of the islands he visited, there was only one kind of resident mockingbird, and that each was different from the others.  The second specimen Darwin collected, now known as the Floreana Mockingbird Nesomimus trifasciatus, can be regarded as the vital bird.  Thanks to its larger size and diagnostic dark breastband, it was so markedly different to the San Cristobal mockingbird Nesomimus melanotis he had already obtained, that Darwin realised it was almost certainly an entirely separate species.  It impressed him sufficiently to ensure that he recorded individual island localities for each of his mockingbird specimens; something he famously did not do with the finches.  His hunch about the differences in the mockingbirds was later confirmed by John Gould, who also recognised that the finches were a single related group of birds.  Following a conversation with Gould about the mockingbirds and the finches in 1837, Darwin opened his first notebook on species transmutation.  However, more than 20 years would elapse before the Origin of Species finally reached publication.

The birds of the Galapagos had shown Darwin that species might change, but did not provide him with sufficient evidence to explain how this might occur.  So, in 1855, Darwin took up keeping fancy pigeons, with a view to exploring natural selection through artificial selection.  In addition to the collection he established in aviaries at his home at Down House, Kent, he also solicited specimens of pigeons and other domestic birds, particularly ducks and chickens, from correspondents around the world. 

Darwin meticulously studied his collection of pigeons, both living and dead, enthusing about them to various correspondents.  However, his dedication to pigeons seems to have exasperated some of his friends, notably Charles Lyell, who seemed more alert to the danger posed to Darwin’s priority on natural selection by delaying publication to gather yet more data.  Eventually, the shocking arrival in 1858 of Wallace’s Ternate Paper in his post forced Darwin into publication.

In November 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection finally appeared.  Given the fame of the finches, it can come as a surprise to discover that the first creatures to be discussed in any detail are fancy pigeons; the birds of the Galapagos get only a passing mention. 

But Darwin was still not finished with pigeons and continued to work on them for almost another decade.  In 1868, his exhaustive work The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication appeared.  He had already begun to present his cherished pigeons to the British Museum in 1867, completing the transfer in 1868 and thereby marking the conclusion of his research.  The entire collection comprises some 120 pigeon skins and skeletons, and nearly 50 chicken and duck skeletons, many of them still retaining Darwin’s own labels and annotations.

From the birds of the voyage of the Beagle to fancy pigeons and chickens, the importance of ornithology in Darwin’s work is clearly evident.  Yet it is also clear that Darwin has been important to ornithology, enabling the study of birds to claim a pivotal role in the history of science.  As the anonymous author of Darwin’s obituary put it:

“We venture to believe that we shall be only echoing the voice of all our readers when we assert that there is not one of them but has felt the dignity of the study which he pursues was raised every time that Mr. Darwin drew from it evidence in support of that theory with which his name will be in all time associated” (Ibis, 1882; 479-484) 

21 June: Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913): An Ornithological Celebration

Revd. Tom Gladwin gave an illustrated talk to a meeting of the Club at the Natural History Museum, Tring, to celebrate and thereby mark two 150th anniversaries, especially the reading of the first paper on natural selection by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin at the Linnean Society on 1st July 1858. The other anniversary being the founding in the same year of the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU).

Wallace was born in Usk on 8th January 1823 and educated at Hertford Grammar School. In 1844 he met the entomologist Henry Bates and in 1848 they departed on an expedition to collect specimens in Northern Brazil. The account of Wallace’s travels in South America A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, published in 1853, reveals that he was already giving thought to the nature of speciation and the factors limiting a species distribution.

In 1854, Wallace arrived in Singapore at the start of his expedition to the Malay Archipelago. In eight years he was to travel 14,000 miles within the Archipelago and obtain 125,660 specimens including 8,000 bird skins. In Sarawak in 1855, he wrote the paper entitled “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” (Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 16: 184-96 Sept. 1855). It ended with the now famous words known as the Sarawak Law, “every species has come into existence both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species”. Sir Charles Lyell brought the paper to Charles Darwin’s attention and, in 1856, possibly sensing he might lose his priority, Darwin drafted the first two chapters of what was to become The Origin of Species. In January 1858, whilst in the Spice Islands, Wallace wrote his famous Ternate paper, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”. This he sent to Darwin who passed it to Lyell together with the copy of an essay he had written in 1844. On the 1st July 1858, these were read by Lyell and Joseph Hooker to a meeting of the Linnaean Society of London (Proc. Lin. Soc. Zool. 3:53-62. 1858). As Darwin acknowledged, Wallace had independently discovered the theory of natural selection and was the first person to write a paper for publication on it.

In 1857 a group of ornithologists who had been meeting for some years resolved, “to establish a Magazine devoted entirely to Ornithology”. Thus the BOU was founded in 1858. In that year Philip Sclater, the first editor of Ibis, had a paper on the “Geographical Distribution of Birds” published by the Linnean Society. On reading it, Wallace wrote to Sclater; his letter (Ibis 1:449-54, 1859) mostly dealt with the separation of the Indian (Oriental) and Australian regions. He suggested the divide, known as the Wallace Line, be drawn down the 25km wide Makassar Strait between Bali and Lombok, between Celebes and Borneo, and between the Moluccas and the Philippines. His monumental work, which confirmed him as the father of zoo-geography, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, was published in 1875.

Wallace died on 7th November 1913 and was buried at Broadstone (Dorset); a memorial plaque on the floor of Westminster Abbey commemorates his life. Obituaries in Ibis and the Bulletin were among the many tributes paid to him. He was elected Honorary Member of the BOU in 1860, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1893, and in 1908 was presented with the first Darwin-Wallace Medal on the 50th anniversary of the Linnean Society meeting of 1st July 1858. He also received Honorary Degrees from Dublin and Oxford Universities and the Order of Merit in 1908.

29 April: AGM and Members' Evening.

After the AGM and a delicious dinner, five members of the club gave short presentations.

Robert Prys-Jones spoke first and described the research he has been doing unearthing the bird collection which Kalman Kittenberger made in East Africa during the first 30 years of last century.  He has tracked down numerous specimens in various museums around the world included nine type specimens.

Tom Gladwin then spoke about the White Wagtails he has recently been seeing in the UK during the winter months and compared these to ringing data from Scotland and Devon. He suggested that White Wagtail might be becoming a more regular winter visitor in the UK and speculated that this could be due to milder winters and global warming. He feels this merits further investigation.

Katrina Cook described an expedition she had been on in November 2007 to Mt. Namuli in Mozambique following in the footsteps of Col. Jack Vincent who had collected birds there some 75 years earlier. The area has been poorly studied and holds a number of important endemic forms including Namuli Apalis.

Michael Casement showed a selection of photographs he had taken on a recent voyage to Antarctica. These included a fine selection of seabirds and a rather bizarre-looking leucistic Gentoo Penguin.

Finally Martin Gauntlett talked about the problems created by the wealth of recently published works on the birds of the world, all of which use different taxonomy. He gave as an example Richard's Pipit and compared the taxonomic treatment followed in seven major publications. Depending upon the authority chosen Richard's Pipit can be regarded as anything between one and seven different species!

11 March: Warblers in the Caucasus - Dr Lars Svensson

Dr Lars Svensson gave a talk on Warblers in the Caucasus, picking out four species of particular interest for a taxonomist, based on a field trip in June 2007 in Georgia and Armenia in the company of José Luis Copete and David Bigas, Spain. Illustrated by photographs of trapped birds, and some of museum specimens for comparison, Svensson dealt first with the Green Warbler Phylloscopus nitidus, and the question whether it merits a status of being a separate species. It proved to be invariably morphologically distinct (in contrast to earlier statements in the literature), with a taxon-specific element in most songs, and clearly deserves to be split from the allopatric Greenish Warbler Ph. trochiloides complex, a path which will soon be recommended also by the Taxonomic Sub-Committee of the BOURC.

Next, the local Lesser Whitethroat Sylvia curruca was brought up, posing the question which subspecies breeds in the area. The described race caucasica seemed subtle though valid, being slightly greyer on upperparts than European nominate. The song did not differ from nominate, though. The question whether caucasica constitutes a link to the Central Asian mountain form Hume’s Lesser Whitethroat (althaea) requires further work, in particular in Iran.

The third warbler to be studied was the Mountain Chiffchaff Ph. sindianus lorenzii. All birds encountered had yellow on underwing and nearly all faint traces of yellowish-green on scapulars and upperwing-coverts, at odds with statements in the literature (incl. by the speaker!). Dr Svensson also stated his view that the Mountain Chiffchaff is distinct enough as to morphology and vocalisation to be treated separate from the ‘Sind Mountain Chiffchaff’ Ph. s. sindianus, thus would become monotypic ‘Caucasian Mountain Chiffchaff’ Ph. lorenzii.

Finally the Common Chiffchaff in the Caucasus and Transcaucasia was discussed. Traditionally, these have been included in the subspecies abietinus, but breeders in West Turkey have been named as brevirostris, and it has not been clear how far this race reaches to the east. Recently, the Caucasian and Transcaucasian birds have been described as caucasicus. However, with the exception of two museum specimens collected on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, no birds seen from Georgia and Armenia differed enough from abietinus to warrant separation. The northern side of the Caucasus remains to be better investigated. The race brevirostris is believed to be a synonym of nominate collybita, and birds in East Turkey might represent a zone of integradation between this and abietinus.

29 January: Birds and people - Dr Nigel Collar

Eggs for breakfast, turkey salad for lunch, coq au vin for dinner, everyday speech (from ‘lame-duck president’ to ‘cloudcuckooland’ – even ‘auspicious’ means, at root, ‘from good birdwatching’), product and team-sport logos conveying speed and strength, national treasures on currency, insulation and comfort of bedding – our use of birds sits at the root of our lives, and we can parse it into three broad categories, broadly running in chronological if overlapping sequence: (1) association and inspiration, (2) semi-sustainable services and (3) intolerable exploitation.

Into the first category fall their use in symbol, myth and art, reflected across many cultures: Horus the falcon of pharaonic creation, the swan-morph of Zeus in his union with Leda (beloved of painters, and since Leonardo commonly depicted as consensual), pelican, phoenix, dove and Goldfinch (Christian symbols, the first two probably mistaken for flamingos), parrots (embodiments of the New World’s earthly paradise), and the sounds used by composers since notation began.

Into the second fall their more practical values to human society: quills for writing, flights for arrows, feathers for status and insulation, songster pets (an ancient trade), ornamental and competitive pets (junglefowl and pigeons), domestic foodstuffs (junglefowl and pigeons), subsistence and sport falconry, cormorant-fishing, hornbill ivory, coalmine canaries, vultures for body disposal, and the great environmental service of insect control.

Into the third pack the nightmare histories of human exploitation at its most unrestrained: the destruction of the Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon and ancient seabird colonies of the Pacific (all for food), astonishing slaughter for nineteenth-century feather fashions (herons, hummingbirds and birds-of-paradise especially), the millenia-old, never-ending saga of European songbird killing, appalling industrial-scale poultry farming, gangland syndication of the birds’-nest soup trade, nation-to-nation violence over guano, and disgrace of the global wild bird trade.

For all this, birds still offer us a lifeline: we use them as indicators of environmental health, as scientific models that teach us about ourselves, and as objects of simple wonder. When these elements combine they bring us the inspiration and instruction we need to manage our planet in the interests of all its inhabitants.