CONCLUSION

EARLY IN December 1923 nearly three dozen men—most of them serious avocational ornithologists—gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuttall Ornithological Club. The keynote speaker for the event was Witmer Stone, who was invited to share his reflections on what had been accomplished in American ornithology over the previous half-century. As a professional ornithologist for over thirty years, editor of the Auk for over a decade, and a recently retired president of the AOU, he possessed a unique insider’s perspective on trends in his field.

Not surprisingly, Stone saw signs of progress all around him. Fifty years earlier, he noted, American ornithologists were much fewer in number and not nearly as differentiated as they were by the 1920s: “The technical ornithologists were not so technical, while the great host of present-day field students—the class of A.O.U. Associates—were largely conspicuous by their absence, and those between these extremes were more nearly on a common level.”¹ In the early years of the Nuttall Club, American ornithology was also much more likely to have been practiced along the barrel of a shotgun. By Stone’s reckoning, approximately 70 percent of the articles in the first two volumes of the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club relied on collected specimens, a figure that had declined to only 20 percent in the most recent volume of the Auk.

Rather than continuing to construct faunal lists and create new subspecies of North American birds based on study skins, scientific ornithologists were now turning to “intensive study of the live bird.”² For example, Stone himself had begun his career in the late 1880s as a traditional avian taxonomist, but by the time he delivered his address he was deeply immersed in the observational studies that were later incorporated into his award-winning book, Bird Studies at Old Cape May (1937).³ As Stone confessed to the Nuttall Club that afternoon, he had discovered that “even an old collector” like himself could learn a great deal through patient observation with a good pair of binoculars.⁴ Recent issues of the Auk, which contained papers on such diverse topics as “the origin of song, principles of migration, food analysis, methods of field identification, and bird-banding,” provided additional evidence of a general shift in perspective toward the living bird.⁵ And as ornithology had broadened its research agenda beyond “purely systematic study,” Stone argued, it was finally “taking its proper place in relation to other sciences.”⁶

Except for his optimistic claims about ornithology’s status in the eyes of other scientists, few of Stone’s contemporaries would quibble with his characterization of developments in their field. Indeed, there was ample evidence that over the previous half-century the American ornithological community had grown dramatically in size, become more differentiated in scope, and shifted its research orientation from collection- to observation-based studies. When S. L. Willard set out to publish a definitive Directory of Ornithologists in 1877, he compiled a modest list of 340 “collectors and students of ornithology” in the United States and Canada.⁷ Less than four decades later, Frank Chapman was declaring that American ornithology was in the midst of an “Epoch of Popular Bird Study” as hundreds of thousands of birdwatchers purchased field guides, joined Audubon societies and bird clubs, and competed to record the most species.⁸

Stone’s sense that the direction of ornithological research had changed over the previous fifty years was also sound. As late as 1901 Robert Ridgway had proclaimed that systematics was the only truly scientific form of bird study.⁹ By 1933 an editorial in the Wilson Bulletin declared that

Anatomy and classification have had their day. . . . Only here and there are morphological problems of importance found. . . . [M]ost of the systematists of today are driven to the work of making subspecies, the biological significance of which is doubtful. . . . The young man who looks forward to a professional career in ornithology would do well to consider the field of experimental laboratory work in development; or the field of economic ornithology and game management; or the field of animal behavior and psychology, including territory problems.¹⁰

Avian systematics was far from dead—Ernst Mayr’s fundamental contributions to the evolutionary synthesis would soon prove that—but field-based ecological and behavioral studies were beginning to dominate ornithological science.¹¹

While Stone may have accurately summarized recent changes in the scope and scale of American ornithology, he failed even to hint at two other closely related and equally crucial transformations looming on the horizon that afternoon: the emergence of graduate education and the growth of employment opportunities in ornithology. By the time Brewster and his contemporaries founded the Nuttall Club in 1873 and the AOU ten years later, American ornithologists were well on their way to forging a scientific discipline organized around the construction of a definitive inventory of North American bird forms. For the next several decades, however, they remained much less successful at finding a way to translate their ornithological expertise into definite career opportunities, even as they gradually expanded the definition of what counted as sound ornithology. With a few prominent exceptions, most ornithologists were forced to pursue their interest in birds solely as an avocation or as an adjunct to a related profession, no matter how dedicated and accomplished they might be.

The emergence of graduate training in ornithology in the 1910s and 1920s and the subsequent expansion of American higher education during the ensuing decades helped break the employment logjam for ornithologists. Gradually the field began to resemble a modern profession, complete with an extended period of formal training, codified procedures for certification, and reasonable employment prospects in colleges and universities, natural history museums, governmental wildlife agencies, and private conservation organizations. Graduate training also exposed students to a much wider variety of approaches to bird study than they had typically gained through apprenticeships or self-study. Thus it hastened the process of diversification in avian research that Stone had highlighted in his Nuttall Club address.

Yet even as ornithology finally began to resemble a modern profession in the 1930s and 1940s, it continued to depend on a variety of amateur practitioners. As we have seen, those lines of dependence were multiple. For example, avocational ornithologists continued to pay the bulk of the membership dues for the AOU, thereby making publication of the Auk possible even in the depths of the Great Depression. When critics—typically newly minted Ph.D.s—began calling for the Auk to raise its publication standards and to become more technically oriented in the 1930s, Stone repeatedly reminded them that the periodical could not possibly survive without the financial backing of a broad readership.

Expansive networks of serious amateur observers also remained the backbone of large-scale bird population monitoring projects that scientific ornithologists designed and administered. By 1939 nearly two thousand birdwatchers were contributing observations for the annual Christmas Bird Count, a number that would double again within the next decade.¹² That same year the Bureau of the Biological Survey’s bird-banding network included nearly twenty-three hundred licensed volunteers, who had managed to band over three million birds since 1920.¹³ While the unwieldy Christmas Bird Count records continued to defy systematic analysis for years, researchers quickly incorporated bird-banding returns into a series of publications.¹⁴

Amateur contributions to ornithology were not confined merely to gathering the data and providing the funds that professional scientists needed to conduct and publish their research. The most dedicated amateurs also continued to tackle their own research projects. Among the most prominent of the examples already mentioned was the Taunton, Massachusetts, businessman Arthur C. Bent, who lacked formal training in ornithology and never received a salary for his painstaking research. Yet from 1919 until his death in 1954, Bent managed to publish twenty-two volumes in his Life Histories of North American Birds series.¹⁵ The monumental project won him accolades from the ornithological community and remained a standard reference work for decades.

Charles Broley, of Winnepeg, Manitoba, was another dedicated avocational ornithologist who made significant contributions to science.¹⁶ After retiring from his position as a branch bank manager in 1938, Broley began banding Southern bald eagles near his winter home in west central Florida. Though he had to scale trees as high as a 150 feet or more to reach their nests, over the next twenty years Broley managed to place aluminum bands on as many as two thousand young bald eagles—more than had been banded across its entire range up to that point. He also monitored the breeding success of the nesting pairs on his banding circuit and in the process discovered a puzzling decline in eagle fertility. In the late 1950s Broley became the first to suggest a link between DDT—one of the new synthetic pesticides that became central to American agriculture in the post-World War II years—and the widespread reproductive failure of the eagle and other birds of prey. Subsequent research confirmed his hunch and eventually led to a ban on DDT use in the United States.¹⁷

The MIT-trained chemical engineer Crawford H. Greenewalt provides yet another example of an accomplished amateur ornithologist from this period.¹⁸ Greenewalt spent his entire career at the Du Pont Company, where he led the effort to scale up nylon production for commercial markets in the 1930s and later directed the construction of plutonium plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge during World War IL An able administrator, he quickly rose through company ranks to become president and later chairman of the board at Du Pont. In the early 1950s Greenewalt became interested in the mechanics of bird flight, and in his spare time he worked closely with Du Pont engineers and MIT’s Harold E. Egerton to develop high-speed photographic equipment capable of capturing the rapid wing movements of hummingbirds. His remarkable photographs eventually appeared in a widely acclaimed book, The Hummingbirds (1960).¹⁹ Later Greenewalt explored the physiology of bird song in a series of publications that culminated in Bird Song: Acoustics and Physiology (1969).²⁰

Though better known than most serious amateur ornithologists, Bent, Broley, and Greenewalt were by no means isolated examples. Well into the twentieth century they and their committed colleagues continued to publish a significant portion of the articles appearing in major American ornithological journals. According to historian Marianne G. Ainley, as late as 1925, 63 percent of the articles in the Auk, 91 percent in the Wilson Bulletin, and 67 percent in the Condor still came from individuals who lacked institutional affiliation and received no compensation for their ornithological research. By 1950 amateur contributions to these three major publications had declined sharply but were still a solid 47, 46, and 34 percent.²¹

While many scientific ornithologists seemed comfortable with the growth of popular interest in birds and the continued amateur presence in their field, others—particularly those fresh from newly established graduate programs— were concerned. Among other things, they feared that recreational birdwatchers, armchair ornithologists, and sentimental conservationists exerted far too much influence on the nation’s most prestigious ornithological society, the AOU, and its journal, the Auk. Beginning in the 1930s, the younger generation of graduatetrained ornithologists struggled to instill the AOU with a more robust professional consciousness—to reorient it toward modem trends in avian research, to make its elections more meritocratic, and to free its periodical from the influence of subscribers who failed to appreciate the need for new approaches to avian research and for greater rigor in how that research was conducted.

Yet even the most strident reformers generally did not aim to expel all the avocational ornithologists from their midst. Nearly everyone agreed there was still room for the thousands of Americans who regularly enjoyed the Christmas Bird Count or banding migrating birds, as long as participants pursued these activities with a modicum of competence and dutifully submitted their raw data to experts for analysis. Many professionally minded ornithologists believed that serious, dedicated amateurs could also make higher-level contributions to ornithology. Certainly that had been Ernst Mayr’s experience with the Bronx County Bird Club in the 1930s, when he channeled the energy and enthusiasm of several talented young birdwatchers into projects with real scientific merit. And even as he led the struggle to establish and maintain rigorous standards for ornithological research over the next several decades, Mayr remained firmly committed to the idea that amateurs could do “splendid work”:

The precision of their observations, the imaginative and highly original posing of problems, and the lucid and informative recording of their researches, which characterize the work of many nonprofessional ornithologists, would dispel any notion of their work being that of dilettantes. . . . They differ or differed from professionals only in one respect, by earning their living as doctors, lawyers, or businessman and receiving no pay for their ornithological labors. Large areas of ornithology owe their major progress to the devotion of such nonprofessionals.²²

As long as amateurs conformed to the scientists’ expectations about what constituted the appropriate questions, methods, and results of research, university-trained ornithologists have generally continued to welcome them into the fold.

A half-century after Stone delivered his Nuttall Club address, ornithologists in the United States and Canada were still grappling with the issue of how best to deal with the significant number of serious amateurs that remained a part of their field. In 1974 the AOU received a National Science Foundation grant to develop a plan for American ornithology. The first of the six panels appointed by the workshop leaders charged with formulating that plan dealt with the role of amateurs in ornithological research. The final report, issued in 1978, stressed the need for fostering a stronger “professional identity” within the American ornithological community.²³ But it also concluded that ornithology was “blessed with a large component of participating amateurs, whose numeric strength and qualitative contribution is perhaps unequaled in any other major biological discipline.”²⁴ Amateurs not only provided crucial financial support for the major American bird journals, they also represented an important “army of manpower” for individual and coordinated field research projects. Dedicated amateurs even continued to produce a small but significant portion of the technical literature in the field (10-15 percent).²⁵

Over the last two centuries, Western science has experienced a series of profound transformations in structure, practice, and content. In one field after another, formally educated, full-time, paid specialists have pushed aside the largely self-trained gentlemanly practitioners who once dominated the pursuit of science. At the same time, prolonged training periods, increased specialization, improved funding, and access to sophisticated equipment have fueled a long series of break-throughs. Modern science has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the natural world while granting us unprecedented power to manipulate and control that world for human ends. During the twentieth century scientific knowledge has become so vast, complex, and expensive to produce that it seems far beyond the grasp of the average citizen. Yet even in the brave new world of contemporary science, some specialities continue to attract a significant number of serious amateurs, dedicated individuals who donate funds, gather data, and sometimes even conduct their own research. Perhaps more than any other field with an enduring amateur presence, ornithology seems to conform to Jacob Bronowski’s inclusive vision for the scientific endeavor: “Let no one tell you again that science is only for specialists; it is not. It is no different from history or good talk or reading a novel; some people do it better and some worse; some make a life’s work of it; but it is within the reach of everybody.”²⁶

No doubt much of the continuing attraction of ornithology—what Mayr has called the “scientia amabilis”—is the object of study itself.²⁷ Birds are ubiquitous, vocal, and colorful creatures. Because they are generally conspicuous, they are relatively simple to locate and observe without elaborate equipment. They engage in courtship and nurturing behavior that is easy to perceive in anthropomorphic terms. Their flight suggests a freedom and power that resonates with the most fundamental human desires. Their cyclical migrations have long been used to mark the annual changes of the seasons. No wonder birds occupy such a prominent place in mythology, art, religion, and folklore around the world.²⁸ And no wonder that over the last century so many Americans have tried to possess, observe, and occasionally even further our understanding of these fascinating creatures.