Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne interviews Christine Jackson on her book ‘A Newsworthy Naturalist: The Life of William Yarrell’ published in association with the British Ornithologists’ Club (BOC). Reproduced with permission from the Quarterly Newsletter (Issue No. 266, August 2022) of the London Natural History Society. Christine E Jackson attended Greenhead High School, a grammar school in Huddersfield and Manchester Library School leading to the qualification A.L.A. (Associate of the Library Association). She was Librarian […]
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BOC Blog
Poo in paradise: a week of fieldwork on Heron Island
When I decided to pursue my passion for poo at PhD level, I never imagined I would end up on Heron Island: a (very) small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Just half a mile long, this sub-tropical island is home to a huge variety of biodiversity. So much so that David Attenborough opted to film there. Fig 1 Heron Island, credit: Andrea Estandía
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Checklist Series – translated!
No, not all of them, just the one for Cuba. It’s number 26 and I strongly advise you to buy it (the printed version, in English), although I may be biased, being one of the authors. Way back last century, in 1975, two of Cuba’s most distinguished ornithologists (and naturalists) wrote a Catálogo de las Aves de Cuba. I don’t think I really need to translate that. Although it was written in Spanish, all the […]
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A new bird species, the New Caledonian Storm-Petrel
Storm-petrels are the smallest of the petrels, are closely related to albatrosses, and represent more than one-third of the world’s truly oceanic seabird species. Most are nocturnal at their nesting sites, shy by nature, and breed on remote and often inaccessible islands. These features of petrels render them difficult to study and many populations are hardly documented. The description or recognition of a new species is a very rare event. Our new study, published in […]
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A Newsworthy Naturalist; The Life of William Yarrell
Published by the British Ornithologists’ Club and John Beaufoy £25 hardback. October 2021. Why write about Willliam Yarrell? A more pertinent question would be “Why has Yarrell been forgotten?” While making very many contributions to natural history in the 1830-50s, his was a household name among naturalists. William Yarrell (1784-1856) was very organised and lived his life in three separate compartments: his business, his publishing and his commitments to several major natural history societies. William […]
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How to name a white bird
Colour aberrations in birds have been my main research focus for more than 30 years, during which I have learnt that identifying and naming these aberrations still presents problems for ornithologists. Many terms for the different colour aberrations have been proposed during the last 175 years. These terms, however, have apparently been used at random to identify aberrations in published records, creating much confusion. Leucism seems to be the most commonly used term and is […]
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