Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk

In looking back over the preparation of these sketches I feel as though each evening I'd gathered up the bits and pieces left over from the day's work and fashioned them into designs for my own amusement and the edification of my family. Truly it's as though I'd used stray feathers, fallen from the bird skins I'd handled, and fitted them together into something of wider interest than the original.

Much of my work now is museum research, working with bird specimens and books. In fashioning a research paper I always amass a great deal more material, that is to say, information and ideas, than I am able to use in it. In place of a lumber room I have a set of files with index headings that range from Abundance and Age, through such headings as Beauty, Feathering of Feet, Fictitious, Hysteria, Pterylography, Social, Song, Tail Feathers, Valentine's Day, to Zoogeography. Here I put the information that is irrelevant at the moment but too interesting to discard. Its source is varied. Some has been accumulated while studying specimens from localities as geographically separated as Alaska, El Salvador, Gabon, Tristan da Cunha, Nepal, Negros, and New Guinea; and while writing papers that range from describing new species to discussing secondary sexual characters and ecological competition. Some have been recorded while in the field on expeditions, trips that ranged from two years in Madagascar, three expeditions in New Guinea, and a season in the Philippines to trips nearer home from the Yukon to Nova Scotia, Florida, and Central America.

Gradually information builds up under each heading, and new ones are added. These items are too interesting to remain buried in the files. They are things people want to know about. So I began to draft them into articles for publication in the museum's monthly, The Chicago Natural History Museum Bulletin. The response was gratifying. The press picked them up and reprinted them. One was used in a ChicagoTribune editorial. Several were used in commercial radio programs. Encouraged, I prepared more, soon overrunning the space available in the bulletin.

Most scientific papers are not written to be read for enjoyment. Conciseness as well as clarity are striven for, conveying certain information in a small compass. The correlations made are often obscure ones, appreciated only by scientists. Yet the material they contain is often intensely interesting, and if these papers were written in a more leisurely style, with more general correlations pointed out, they would provide both interesting and entertaining reading. In a few cases my own research falls in this class, and I've rewritten some of my own papers with this in mind (see "Battle of the Sexes and Its Evolutionary Significance").