The BOC Gavel Many years ago, while attending a BOC supper meeting at Imperial College, London, to give a talk on Cinereous Vultures in Mallorca, I was struck by the sight of a wonderful wooden artefact sitting on the table in front of the chairman. Curious, I picked it up and was even more surprised to see the object in detail. The gavel was presented to the BOC by Richard Meinertzhagen at the April 1951 […]
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BOC Blog
Founders of the British Ornithologists’ Club: 2. Henry Seebohm (1832–1895)
Henry Seebohm was a distinguished writer, traveller, collector, ethnographer, and theorist and was instrumental in the founding and management of many of the learned societies of the day. Early Life He was born into a Quaker family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on 12th July 1832, the oldest child of a wool merchant, and was educated in the Quaker community in York. After working as a grocery assistant, he soon embarked on a life in business, initially […]
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Founders of the British Ornithologists’ Club: 1. Richard Bowdler Sharpe
Richard Bowdler Sharpe (RBS) is unquestionably the outstanding bird curator in the history of what are now the Natural History Museum (NHM) collections. Born on 22 November 1847, the son of the publisher of “Sharpe’s London Magazine”, he was a brilliant scholar with a deep love of natural history and when still young began to assemble a substantial bird skin collection. His father viewed these interests with disfavour and, on leaving school in 1863, RBS […]
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Herbert Stevens (1877-1964): Collector, Benefactor and Enigma
Herbert Stevens (1877-1964): F.Z.S., F.R.G.S.,M.S.P.F.(M.F.F.I.), M.B.O.C. Collector, Benefactor and Enigma. By Amberley Moore February 2023 At the meeting of the British Ornithologists’ Club on November 12 1924, a new Member, Herbert Stevens, was introduced by the Chairman – “Mr Stevens has been collecting birds and mammals in Tonkin (Vietnam) for the British Museum under the Salman Godman Fund. Unfortunately, through the capsizing of a river steamer, Mr Stevens lost all his notes and photographs, and […]
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Is the Crimson-crested Turaco a species in its own right?
Originally, three turaco species were described from the Horn of Africa: the widespread White-cheeked Turaco Tauraco leucotis, the Crimson-crested Turaco T. donaldsoni, and the Ruspoli’s Turaco T. ruspolii, the latter two being endemic Ethiopian taxa. Subsequent taxonomic revisions relegated the Crimson-crested Turaco to a subspecies of the White-cheeked Turaco, and this classification is now of long standing. This revision was the result of an ambiguous interpretation of their actual ranges due to a lack of […]
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Beneath the feet of the dodo – a new ground thrush from Mauritius
The Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues, situated in the southwest Indian Ocean, once harboured a number of diverse bird species, most notably the Mauritian Dodo. Unlike most other oceanic islands, the Mascarenes were in pristine condition when first discovered by humans, who recorded important but often vague details in ships’ logs and journals. The arrival of Europeans at the end of the 16th century, with their accompanying commensal animals, proved disastrous for the […]
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