The following is a timeline of ornithology events:
Until 1700
1500–800 BC – The
Vedas mention the habit of brood parasitism in the
Asian koel (Eudynamys scolopacea).[1]
4th century BC –
Aristotle mentions over 170 sorts of birds in his work on animals. He recognises eight principal groups.
3rd century BC – The Erya, a Chinese encyclopedia comprising glosses on passages in ancient texts, notably the
Book of Songs, features 79 entries in its chapter "Describing Birds"
2nd century AD –
Aelian mentions a number of birds in his work on animals. Birds are listed alphabetically
1037 – Death of Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina (known as
Avicenna in Latin) author of Abbreviatio de animalibus, a homage to
Aristotle
c 1100
Hugh of Fouilloy authors De avibus, a moral treatise on birds later incorporated into many versions of the popular medieval
bestiary.
1220 – Books on birds and other animals by
Aristotle and
Avicenna translated into Latin for the first time by
Michael Scot
1250 – Death of
Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, and author of De arte venandi cum avibus ("concerning the art of hunting with birds") that describes the first manipulative experiments in ornithology and the methods of
falconry
1478 – De Avibus by
Albertus Magnus is printed, which mentions many bird names for the first time
1599 – Beginning of the publication of the works of
Ulisse Aldrovandi on birds.
1603 –
Caspar Schwenckfeld publishes the first regional fauna of Europe: Therio-tropheum Silesiae.
1605 –
Clusius publishes Exoticorum libri decem ("Ten books of exotics") in which he describes many new exotic species.
1609 – The illustrated Sancai Tuhui, a Chinese encyclopedia by Wang Qi & Wang Siyi, lists a total of 113 species of bird.
1638 –
Georg Marcgraf begins a voyage to Brazil where he studies the fauna and flora.
1652 –
Leopoldina founded in the
Holy Roman Empire. It is the oldest continuously existing learned society in the world.
1655 –
Ole Worm collects a famous
cabinet of curiosities whose illustrated inventory appears in 1655, Museum Wormianum. This collection comprises many birds but the techniques of conservation are not successful and they are quickly destroyed by insects.
1657 – Publication of Historiae naturalis de avibus by
John Jonston.
1676 – Publication of
Francis Willughby's Ornithologia by his collaborator
John Ray. This is considered the beginning of scientific ornithology in Europe, revolutionizing ornithological
taxonomy by organizing species according to their physical characteristics
1681 – The last
dodo dies on the island of
Mauritius
1731–1738
Eleazar Albin publishes A Natural History of Birds
1731–1743 –
Mark Catesby publishes his Natural History of Carolina, which contains coloured plates of the birds of that colony, Florida and the
Bahamas
1742–1743 –
Johann Heinrich Zorn publishes Petino-Theologie oder Versuch, Die Menschen durch nähere Betrachtung Der Vögel Zur Bewunderung Liebe und Verehrung ihres mächtigsten, weissest- und gütigsten Schöpffers aufzumuntern. Ornithotheology, or an encouragement to humanity, through a careful observation of birds, towards admiration, love and respect for their powerful, of the wise and good Creator.
1743 –
George Edwards begins publication of his bird plates
1774 –
Jacob Christian Schäffer divides the birds into two
families, Palmipedes (web-footed) and the much larger family Nudipedes (not web-footed) in Elementa Ornithologica.
1775 –
Ashton Lever begins exhibiting his bird collection at a public museum called the
Holophusikon
1779–1780
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Handbuch der Naturgeschichte; 12 editions and some translations. Published first in Göttingen by J. C. Dieterich
1780
Lazzaro SpallanzaniDissertationi di fisica animale e vegetale published. It includes investigations into bird physiology.
1782 –
Pierre Joseph BuchozLes dons merveilleux et diversement coloriés de la nature dans le règne animal, ou collection d’animaux précieusement coloriés (Paris : chez l'auteur)
1785 –
John Latham completes his Synopsis of Birds, which describes many birds collected in Australia and the Pacific Ocean.
Thomas Pennant publishes Arctic Zoology.
1786–1789 –
Anders Erikson Sparrman publishes Catalogue of the Museum Carlsonianum in which he described many of the specimens he had collected in South Africa and the South Pacific, some of which were new to science. In 1806 he published an Ornithology of Sweden
1788 –
Johann Friedrich Gmelin commences work on the 13th edition of Systema Naturae which includes the classification of many birds for the first time, especially those described by Latham
1788 – “de Arte Venandi cum Avibus” by Frederick II (d. 1250) published and compared favorably to contemporary science by
Blasius Merrem and Johan Gottlobb Schneider
1789 – Publication of
Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
1789–1813 –
George Shaw commences The Naturalist's Miscellany or Coloured Figures Of Natural Objects; Drawn and Described Immediately From Nature
1797 –
François Le Vaillant begins publication of his Oiseaux d'Afrique giving details of species encountered on his exploration of South Africa. This work was translated into several languages and established his fame as a bird artist.
1799 –
François Marie Daudin writes Traité élémentaire et complet d'Ornithologie (Natural History of Birds), one of the first "modern" handbooks of ornithology, combining Linnean
binomial nomenclature with the anatomical and physiological descriptions of Buffon. Unfortunately it was never completed.
1799 –
Philippe-Isidore Picot de Lapeyrouse publishes Tables méthodiques des mammifères et des oiseaux observés dans le département de la Haute-Garonne. Also
Bernard Germain de Lacépède, in Discours d'ouverture et de clôture du cours d'histoire naturelle, places the birds in 130
genera in 39
orders.
1799 –
Alexander von Humboldt journeys to South America where he finds the
oilbird. He described it in 1817. Later in the trip he observed the behaviour of the
Andean condor
19th century
1800–1804 – "Le Geographe" and "Le Naturaliste" leave France for the
Pacific Ocean under the overall command of
Nicolas Baudin. The naturalists on board made a collection of over 100,000 zoological specimens. Many bird species will be described by
Louis Pierre Vieillot and published in Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle (1816–1819).
1800–1817 –
Johann Conrad Susemihl publishes a 22-part survey of the birds of Germany, Teutsche Ornithologie oder Naturgeschichte aller Vögel Teutschlands in naturgetreuen Abbildungen und Beschreibungen.
1802 –
Louis Dufresne popularizes the use of arsenical soap for preserving birds, a technique which had enabled the
Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris to build the greatest collection of birds in the world
1811 –
Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger published Prodromus systematis mammalium et avium in which he proposed the review of the Linnean system and firmly established the concept of the
Family earlier proposed by François Marie Daudin. Illiger is considered the founder of the School of Nomenclatural Purists.
1815 –
Coenraad Jacob Temminck publishes his Manuel d'ornithologie, the standard work on European birds for many years
1816 –
Blasius Merrem proposes a division of birds into Ratitae (
ratites or running birds, with a flat
sternum) and
Carinatae (carinates or flying birds, with a keeled sternum), which formed part of his classification of birds in Tentamen Systematis Naturalis Avium
1820–1844 –
Johann Friedrich Naumann publishes Naturgeschichte der Vögel Deutschlands, The Natural History of German Birds
1820–23 – Encouraged by
William Elford LeachWilliam John Swainson became the first illustrator and naturalist to use
lithography for his Zoological Illustrations a relatively cheap work which did not require an engraver.
(1826–39) –
René Primevère Lesson writes the vertebrate zoological section of Voyage au tour du monde sur
La Coquille. Lesson was the first naturalist to see live birds of paradise in the
Moluccas and
New Guinea.
1826–1829 – Russian
Senjawin expedition.
Heinrich von Kittlitz collects 754 specimens of 314 bird species, including unique specimens of species that subsequently became extinct to the museum of the
Russian Academy of Sciences.
1828 –
Roret, (Libraire) publish the second edition of
Pierre Boitard and
Emmanuel CanivetManuel du naturaliste préparateur ou l’art d’empailler les animaux et de conserver les végétaux et les minéraux
1840 –
Luigi Benoit publishes Ornitologia Siciliana
1843 –
William Yarrell publishes History of British Birds as a whole in three volumes. It first appeared in parts of 3 sheets every 2 months from 1837 onwards.
1857 –
Philip Sclater presents his paper (published in 1858) "On the General Geographical Distribution of the Members of the Class Aves" to the
Linnean Society, setting up six zoological regions which he called the Palaearctic, Aethiopian, Indian, Australasian, Nearctic and Neotropical. They are still in use.
1868 –
Bernard Altum publishes Der Vogel und sein Leben (Birds and their lives)
1868–1882 –
José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage begins Aves das possessões portuguesas d’ Africa occidental que existem no Museu de Lisboa, da 1ª à 24ª lista 1868 a 1882.
1879 –
Richard Owen publishes the results of his studies of
moa fossils.
1879 –
Tommaso Salvadori publishes Ornitologia della Papuasia e delle Molucche. Torino.
1880 –
Percy Evans Freke 1880 A comparative catalogue of birds found in Europe and North America. The Scientific proceedings of the
Royal Dublin Society.
1881 –
Kōno Bairei publishes Album of One Hundred Birds.
1888 –
Max Fürbringer uses a mathematical analysis to create a classification system for birds that influences avian taxonomy throughout the 20th century
1892 –
Walter Rothschild opens a private museum in
Tring. It housed one of the largest natural history collections in the world.
1894 – Although
Ignazio Porro had invented
binoculars in 1859, high quality binoculars were first on sale in 1894, after the optical designs of
Ernst Abbe were combined with the production techniques of
Carl Zeiss. Binoculars revolutionised bird identification and field observation.
1895 –
Emil Weiske begins collecting in New Guinea.
1900 –
Ernst Hartert monographs the
Trochilidae in volume 9 of the series Das Tierreich (the Animal Kingdom) published in Berlin by R. Friedländer und Sohn
1905–1906 –
Bror Yngve SjöstedtWissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Schwedischen Zoologischen Expedition nach dem Kilimandjaro, dem Meru und umgebenden Massaisteppen Deutsch-Ostafrikas.
1907 – The monthly journal British Birds begins publication
1907 –
Kurt Floericke becomes the editor of Kosmos – Die Zeitschrift für alle Freunde der Natur or Magazine for the Friends of Nature
1909 – First organised
ringing schemes in the UK[4]
1910–1913 –
Edward Adrian Wilson is the zoologist on the
Terra Nova Expedition. He died with the rest of the party but in 1987 Edward Wilson's Birds of the Antarctic was edited by
Brian Roberts and posthumously published
1916 –
Marion Ellis Rowan paints birds on the first of many trips to New Guinea.
1918–1949 –
Carl Eduard Hellmayr ends the chaos of systematic and nomenclatural confusion created by previous ornithologists working on South American birds in Catalogue of Birds of the Americas. It takes four decades and fifteen volumes.
1921–1932 The
Whitney South Sea Expedition visits islands in the south Pacific region collecting over 40,000 bird specimens. The expedition also seals the extinction of the
Guadalupe caracara
1922 – Foundation of the International Council for Bird Preservation (now
BirdLife International)
1922 – Publication of John Charles Phillips's A Natural History of the Ducks, which provides maps of the known breeding and wintering distributions of ducks throughout the world
1922 William Rowan tests the effect of photoperiodism on the size of gonads in birds
1925 –
Perrine Millais Moncrieff publishes a field guide New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them.
1927 –
Frédéric Courtois publishes Les oiseaux du musée de Zi-Kia-Wei
1928 –
Ernst Mayr leads the first of three expeditions to New Guinea and the
Solomon Islands, during which he discovers many new species
1932 –
Yoshimaro Yamashina founds the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology at his home in
Shibuya, Tokyo. His research centred on the use of the
chromosomes of bird to distinguish species (and, later, DNA).
1933 –
Nagamichi Kuroda publishes Birds of the Island of Java (2 Volumes, 1933–36)
1934 –
Roger Tory Peterson publishes his Guide to the Birds, the first modern field guide
1950 – Rocket nets developed by the Wildfowl Trust for catching geese
1950 –
Willi Hennig publishes Grundzüge einer Theorie der phylogenetischen Systematik (Basic outline of a theory of
phylogenetic systematics). This work, at first obscure and controversial, founds
cladistics and is mainstream by 1980.
1951–1954 – The six volume Birds of the Soviet Union by GP Dementev and NA Gladkov published
1953 –
Niko Tinbergen publishes The Herring Gull's World
1954 – The
Heinz Sielmann film Zimmerleute des Waldes[5] (Carpenters of the forest) shown on UK television with the title Woodpecker. It was a huge success.
1954 – First edition of Avian Physiology published by Paul D. Sturkie. The work related mainly to domestic birds and especially
poultry, but later editions of the work, now titled Sturkie's Avian Physiology include studies of wild birds.
1954 –
Arthur Cain refers to the "circular overlaps" of Mayr (1942) as
ring species in Animal species and evolution'
1961 – Nature photographer
Sakae Tamura publishes Tamagawa no tori, (Birds of River Tama, Tokyo)
1961 –
Eric Hosking publishes Bird Photography as a Hobby, popularising bird photography.
1961 –
William Homan Thorpe publishes Bird-Song. The biology of vocal communication and expression in birds pioneering the use of
sound spectrography in bird studies.
1970 – The Atlas of Breeding Birds of the West Midlands by Lord and Munns, based on field work by members of the
West Midland Bird Club, published by
Collins, is the first to use systematic grid-based method for gathering of information.
1970 –
Derek Ratcliffe discovers changes attributable to pesticides in egg breakage frequency and eggshell thickness in some British birds and publishes a paper so titled in the Journal of Applied Ecology
1971–1973 –
Hans-Wilhelm Koepckecombines many biological concepts in Die Lebensformen: Grundlagen zu einer universell gültigen biologischen Theorie in English, Life Forms: The basis for a universally valid biological theory. Birds, and Peruvian or South American birds especially figure prominently.
1981 –
Cyril A. Walker describes the Enantiornithes, a new subclass of fossil birds [Walker CA (1981) New subclass of birds from the Cretaceous of South America. Nature 292:51–53.]
1984 – Publication of The Atlas of Australian Birds
1991 – First new species described without a skin as a
type specimen. The
Bulo Burti boubou (Laniarius liberatus) of
Somalia described on basis of DNA sequence from a feather.
1991 – A color atlas of avian anatomy by John McLelland explores the external features, skeleton, and body systems of birds
1992 – Avibase database commenced by
Bird Studies Canada. At 2010 the database holds 5 million records of 10,000 species (22,000 subspecies) and has online World checklists, taxonomic notes and multilingual synonyms.[6]
1993 – Vision, brain, and behavior in birds by H Philip Zeigler and Hans-Joachim Bischof published
1994 – Jonathan Weiner publishes The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
1995 – Hou Lianhai describes the Confuciusornis, a new subclass of birds, from a fossil found in the Jinzhou market, Liaoning, China[7]
1997 – Use of stable hydrogen isotope signatures in feathers to identify origin of birds.[8]
1999 –
Alan Feduccia publishes The Origin and Evolution of Birds arguing against the view that birds originated from and are deeply nested within
Theropoda (and are therefore living theropod dinosaurs).
21st century
2000 – Harold Lisle Gibbs, Michael D. Sorenson, Karen Marchetti, Nick Davies, M. de L. Brooke and Hiroshi Nakamura provide genetic evidence for female
host-specific races of the
common cuckoo
2002 – Peter Bennett and Ian Owens publish Evolutionary Ecology of Birds: Life Histories, Mating systems, and Extinction
2003 – Michael D. Sorenson, Elen Oneal, Jaime García-Moreno and David P. Mindell discuss the enigmatic
hoatzin without reaching a conclusion in a paper entitled "More Taxa, More Characters: The Hoatzin Problem Is Still Unresolved."
2004 – Thomas J.Hopp and Mark J. discover
oviraptorosaur specimens in a nesting position similar to that of modern birds. The arms of these specimens are positioned in such a way that they could perfectly cover their eggs if they had small wings and a substantial covering of feathers.
2004 – Proposal to identify bird species through DNA sequence by Hebert PDN et al.[10] using method termed as
DNA barcoding.
2004 – Sandy Podulka, Ronald W. Rohrbaugh, Jr., and Rick Bonney edit second edition of Handbook of Bird Biology.
^von Helmholtz, Hermann (1873). Uber ein Theorem, geometrisch Ohnliche Bewegungen flussiger Korper betreffend, nebst Anwendung auf das Problem, Luftballons zu lenken. Monatsbericht d. K. Akad. Wissenschaft, Berlin. The law is that the weight of a flying animal is proportional to the cube of its linear dimension and the wing area is proportional to the square of the animals linear dimension, in soaring birds.
^Spencer, R. 1985. Marking. In: Campbell. B. & Lack, E. 1985. A dictionary of birds. British Ornithologists' Union. London, pp. 338–341.
^Hou L, Zhou Z, Martin L, Feduccia A (1995), "A beaked bird from the Jurassic of China", Nature 277:616–618
^Chamberlain CP, Blum JD, Holmes RT, Feng X, Sherry TW, Graves GR (1997), "The use of isotope tracers for identifyingpopulations of migratory birds",
Oecologia 109:132–141
^Piersma T, Gill RE (1998), "Guts don't fly: small digestive organs in obese bar-tailed godwits", Auk 115:196–203
Boubier, Maurice. (1925) L’Évolution de l’ornithologie. Nouvelle collection scientifique, Paris.
Chansigaud, Valerie. (2010) The History of Ornithology New Holland.
ISBN978-1-84773-433-4 (First published in France in 2007 as Histoire de l'ornithologie)
Farber, P. L. (1977) The development of taxidermy and the history of ornithology. Isis 68: 550–566.
Gebhardt, Ludwig (2006) Die Ornithologen Mitteleuropas. Aula-Verlag, Wiebelsheim.
Haffer J. (2001) Ornithological research traditions in central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Journal of Ornithology 142: 27–93
Robin, Libby. (2001) The Flight of the Emu: a hundred years of Australian ornithology 1901–2001. Carlton, Vic. Melbourne University Press.
Stresemann, Erwin. (1975) Ornithology: From Aristotle to the Present Harvard University Press.
ISBN978-0-674-64485-4 Translation of Erwin Stresemann Entwicklung der Ornithologie 1951.