The Alexander and Alexander map was the first published illustration of the comprehensive results of a local bird survey – simple in its execution but highly influential to this day.
44 : Map of breeding migrants
1909
The Alexander and Alexander map was the first published illustration of the comprehensive results of a local bird survey – simple in its execution but highly influential to this day.
A key early paper in British Birds was ‘On a plan of mapping migratory birds in their nesting areas’ (Alexander and Alexander, 1909). This contribution from came from two of three famous ornithological brothers: H G Alexander, who later authored Seventy Years of Birdwatching and lived to see his 100th birthday in 1989; and his brother Christopher, who died in Flanders in 1917. It contained ideas and methods that would become the root of birders’ habitual counting and surveying of birds, and grow into the kind of citizen science that enables the success of many RSPB and BTO surveys to this day. It was the origin of systematic bird monitoring as we now know it.
A summary of two years’ worth of extensive private survey work carried out around Tunbridge Wells, Kent, their data and map demonstrated the local changes in population of summering bird species. They showed that visiting breeders were territorial, and were able to estimate each species’ breeding population accordingly; in effect, they had invented a kind of common bird census years before the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO).
After organising an Oxford bird census in 1927, a year later Max Nicholson used British Birds to organise and initiate the first count of British heronries – the most comprehensive survey of a single species at the time. He published the prescient results and conclusions in that same periodical in 1929.
It was obvious now that the growing legions of amateur birdwatchers could be corralled into accumulating useful scientific and conservation data. British Birds had occasionally ruminated on founding a national ornithological research organisation for the disparate and localised data being gathered around the country, and by 1933 this idea had finished its gestation. Nicholson, Bernard Tucker and Wilfred Alexander – the third brother – formed the BTO in partnership with Oxford University.
The trust has operated ever since as an independent generator of and clearing house for ornithological research (it being ‘uncongenial’ for Britain to have a governmental body performing such a service, Nicholson wrote in 1931). Particular emphasis is still placed on population surveys, and ringing has played a motivational importance, the BTO not only granting ringers’ licences through its ad hoc training programme but co-ordinating single species surveys and the Constant Effort Site scheme.
For many years the BTO was based at Tring, Hertfordshire, but a 1991 move to donated premises and land in Thetford, Norfolk, enabled it to establish a new headquarters and even maintain its own nature reserve. The organisation has achieved a more public profile in recent years, capitalising on the mass appeal of projects such as ‘observer inclusive’ atlas fieldwork and a fascinating Common Cuckoo radio-tracking programme which has generated extraordinary new findings about the species. Arguably, however, the origins of much of its work which is derived from data gathered in the field can be traced back more than a century to a map drawn by two brothers in the borough of Tunbridge Wells.