A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects

Conrad Martens, official artist of the second voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–1836), depicted the ship in watercolours in his painting Mount Sarmiento, Tierra del Fuego (above) as it was moored on this southernmost coast of South America. Inland, Darwin collected specimens of an unknown ratite, later to be named Darwin’s Rhea (top).

What would birding be without the theory of evolution? A lot easier but not as engrossing, and for the eternal diversion of relationships and ‘lumps’ and ‘splits’ between species, above all we have Charles Darwin to thank.

Arguably, Darwin would not have come to his still radical-to-some conclusions without the opportunity to become ship’s naturalist on ex-Royal Navy ‘brig-sloop’ HMS Beagle. The ship undertook three worldwide expeditions between 1825 and 1843, the first and second mostly under the captainship of Flag Lieutenant Robert Fitzroy. HMS Beagle set sail from Plymouth in October 1831 with Darwin on board, for its second voyage, on which it would survey much of South America, returning famously via the Galápagos Islands, then New Zealand and Australia, finally reaching Cornwall in October 1836.

The geological surveys and natural history observations from the expedition took Darwin almost 23 years to digest. His resulting work, On The Origin of Species, went on sale in November 1859. While the book covered a breathtaking range of natural history subjects, it was immediately applicable to ornithology. Long before publication, John Gould (see pages 54–55) had pointed out in 1837 that Darwin’s specimen of a rhea from the South American mainland was different to the known species, and that finches and mockingbirds found on the Galápagos differed from island to island.

The voyage itself took place after the ‘Age of Exploration’, as historians have dubbed the period between the 15th and 17th centuries, and most of the world’s major trade routes had by then been established, with colonial stopovers possible on many coasts during the voyage. The main purpose of HMS Beagle’s voyage was actually to undertake hydrographic surveys of the coast of South America, to produce sea charts for the military and the merchant navy. The then 22-year-old Charles Darwin was accepted onto the expedition as the ship’s geologist, and had to pay his own way. He already had a gift for theorising, partly inspired by the relative practical inadequacy of the geological textbooks of the time, which would give him a temporal context for his imaginings of how animals and plants changed over time.

His theory has become more unassailable over the years, and is now virtually universally accepted as a natural law in biology. In ornithology, it enables the understanding of the ancestral relationships between species, to draw up rational classifications and sort birds into the genera, species and subspecies that birders love to identify in a field context. Once understood, it is viewed by most as an enrichment of the appreciation of the variation, and overwhelming variety, of birds.