Recognising pioneers
Here, we remember the important work carried out by early ornithologists in their scientific study of birds
L"et it not suffice us to be Booklearn’d, to read what others have written, and to take upon Trust more Falsehood than Truth; but let us ourselves examine Things as we have Opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as Books.”
John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1691
I have always lived among the ghosts of naturalists. Several years ago, my wife and I were living in the Welsh village of Llanbadoc, just outside the town of Usk in Monmouthshire. Less than a mile from us stood the cottage where Alfred Russell Wallace was born in 1823. Similarly, my home village of Castle Hedingham in Essex contains the birthplace of Mark Catesby.
Friends of ours owned the house, where we spent many an hour, personally oblivious at the time to its significance. Ten miles to the south, the village of Black Notley, near the town of Braintree, still holds the birthplace of John Ray, while the great man lies in the churchyard. Perhaps I shall see out my days in Downe in Kent?
Ray was born in Black Notley on the 29 November 1627; said to have been in the
forge, his father being the village blacksmith. At the age of 16, he was enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he subsequently became a minor fellow in 1649 and later a major fellow (he resigned in protest against the Act of Uniformity in 1662), holding many collegiate offices. According to the habit of the time, he was accustomed to preaching in the college chapel, and the university church of Great St Mary’s, long before he took holy orders in 1660. Ray was also highly regarded as a tutor, communicating his own passion for natural history to several pupils and his friend Francis Willughby.
Willughby was born at Middleton Hall in Warwickshire on the 22nd November 1635, the son of Sir Francis Willughby, a wealthy aristocrat whose family seat was
Wollaton Hall in Nottingham. He studied at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield, before entering Trinity College in 1652 at the age of 17. There he formed an acquaintance with Ray. It has been generally claimed that Willughby was Ray’s pupil, though there is scant evidence that this was the case. What is certain is that they spent much of their time together studying natural history.
After leaving Cambridge in 1662, Ray travelled through most of Britain on three separate journeys. Willughby joined him on the west coast to study breeding seabirds and they observed Puffins on Bardsey Island (now a National Nature Reserve). Ray notes that he heard there of the superstition that Puffins were incapable of flight over land. Willughby writes of “The Bird called the Razorbill in the West of England, the Auk in the North, the Murre in Cornwall.”
A year later, Ray embarked on a tour through Europe with Willughby and two pupils, travelling through the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. Willughby had just been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, four years before his friend. Ray returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter continued his journey into Spain. From this tour, they returned laden with collections on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
THEY WERE AMONG THE FIRST TO DISMISS THE OLDER INACCURACIES OF ARISTOTLE. ARISTOTLE HAD CLAIMED THAT SWALLOWS HIBERNATED...
Tragedy struck
On returning to England they made plans to publish the results of their studies, but tragedy struck not long after. On the 3 July 1672, Willughby died from pleurisy “to the immense grief of his Friends and all good men that knew him”. He was only 36 years old. Seven years earlier, Willughby had succeeded to the estates of Wollaton and Middleton on the death of his father. Since leaving Cambridge, Ray seems to have depended chiefly on the generosity of Willughby, who made the former his constant companion while he was alive, including allowing him to live at his home at Middleton (now Middleton Lakes RSPB). Willughby arranged that after his death, Ray would continue to live at Middleton and have six shillings a year for educating Willughby’s two sons.
In 1676, four years after his friend’s death, Ray saw Willughby’s three-volume Ornithologia libri tres through the press, with an English edition two years later. This is considered the beginning of
scientific ornithology in Europe, revolutionising ornithological taxonomy by organising species according to their physical characteristics (researched via Ray’s dissection of specimens).
They were among the first to dismiss the older inaccuracies of Aristotle. Aristotle had claimed that Swallows hibernated, but they wrote: “To us it seems more probable that they fly away into hot Countries, viz. Egypt, Ethiopia, etc.” In a sense they were the first modern birders. Whereas their approach to taxonomy seems to have concentrated on morphology and physical structure, the species account does include some references to voice.
On Bittern, “They say, that it gives always an odd number of bombs at a time, viz. three or five; Which in my own observation I have found to be false. It begins to bellow about the beginning of February, and ceases when breeding time is over…In the Autumn after Sun-set these birds are wont to soar aloft in the air with a spiral ascent so high till they get quite out of sight: In the mean time making a singular kind of noise, nothing like to lowing.”
The same year, Ray left Middleton Hall (no longer welcome by Willughby’s widow) and returned to Black Notley where he spent the rest of his days. Four years later, Mark Catesby was born down the road in
Castle Hedingham on the 24 March 1683. Ray’s life in Essex was quiet and uneventful, although he had poor health including chronic sores. He continued writing books and corresponded widely on scientific matters. An acquaintance with Ray through a family friend led to Catesby to become interested in natural history and the young man repaired to London to study the subject.
Ray lived, despite his infirmities, to the age of 77, dying on the 17 January 1705. Widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists and ‘the father of natural history’, his 23 important works on botany, zoology and natural theology include a classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum – an important step towards modern taxonomy. He rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a preconceived, either/or type system and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term ‘species’ and his works were directly influential on the development of taxonomy by Carl Linnaeus.
In 1712, Catesby went to stay with his sister in Williamsburg, Virginia. The death of his father, a lawyer and gentleman farmer, nine years earlier had left him enough to live on. All the while collecting, Catesby visited the West Indies in 1714, before returning home via Virginia in 1719. Coincidentally, in 1713, Willughby’s daughter Cassandra married James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, a patron of Mark Catesby. Catesby’s collections made his name back home and in 1722 a plant collecting expedition to Carolina was commissioned on behalf of the Royal Society.
A publication first
Catesby settled in Charlestown, South Carolina, travelling throughout eastern North America and the West Indies, before returning home in 1726. Between 1729 and 1747 he published his most famous work, the two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first published account of the flora and fauna of North America. It included 220 plates of birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish, insects and mammals, as well as plants. It remained the most authoritative work on American natural history, particularly birdlife, for over a century after its publication and Catesby is often described as ‘the founder of American ornithology’.
Catesby completed the first volume in 1732 and a year later he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. The second volume was completed in 1747 and during the last year of its production he published a supplement from material sent to him by friends in America. It was to be a work of
enduring quality and wide appeal with two further editions produced – the third in 1771. Its success was in no small part due to the beauty of the illustrations. Although Catesby’s botanical paintings were largely cited by Linnaeus only as secondary references, the great botanist took many of his names for birds directly from Catesby’s work.
Catesby’s engravings in his magnum opus were notable for several reasons. He was the first to use folio-sized coloured plates in natural history books and he learnt how to etch them himself. Rather than adopting the traditional method of crosshatching, he instead followed the natural lines of feathers in his bird paintings, for example, a laborious method but one that produced a more natural look. Another innovation was to depict his birds in association with the plants upon which they fed or where they nested or were otherwise seen. In the preface to this work, Catesby writes:
“As I was not bred a Painter I hope some faults in Perspective, and other Niceties, may be more readily excused, for I humbly conceive Plants, and other Things done in a Flat, tho’ exact manner, may serve the Purpose of Natural History, better in some Measure than in a more bold and Painter like way…and where it would admit of, I have adapted the Birds to those Plants on which they fed, or have any Relation to.”
Bird paintings
The first eight plates had no backgrounds, but from then on, Catesby included plants with his animals. This approach was pioneering in ornithological illustration and in most cases both the associations and depictions of the birds themselves are accurate. It is perhaps for this reason that although Catesby was a botanist, his most famous book became celebrated for its paintings of birds.
Catesby’s other notable contribution to ornithology was his essay entitled ‘Of Birds of Passage’, which he read to the Royal Society in 1747, in which he was the first to describe details relating to bird migration. Although in some aspects Catesby revealed the naivety common at the time regarding this phenomenon, he was also in advance of many more famous contemporaries in his understanding.
Following a collapse, Catesby died at his home on Old Street, London, on 23 December 1749, aged 65, and was buried in the churchyard of St Luke’s behind his house.
One hundred and twenty-two years separate Ray’s birth from Catesby’s death. This period of English history witnessed the reign of eight monarchs, encompassing the Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration and the Acts of Union. They were unstable yet remarkable times. Ornithology under Ray, Willughby and Catesby had advanced further during the Enlightenment than it had since Aristotle.
‘The Wonderful Mr Willughby: The First True Ornithologist’ by Tim Birkhead is published by Bloomsbury.