These days find us — some of us — remembering Pierre Belon, the greatest of French Renaissance natural historians, who was murdered by Counter-Reformationist thugs in the Bois de Boulogne 450 years ago this month. Belon’s Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, published in 1555 in Paris, remains one of the most valuable compilations of classical, medieval, and early modern ornithology around, well worth consulting whenever a historical question arises.
The introductory material includes a chapter titled “The chief marks available to us as characters by which to identify birds” — one of the earliest and most complete tracts on a subject that is at the heart of our hobby today. Writes Belon,
The bill and the feet are the principle characters indicated by the ancient authors as necessary to attend to when identifying and distinguishing birds.
But identification also profits from the observation of the birds’ habits:
We must also notice the differences in the birds’ housekeeping if we are to give them their correct names…. Some live by capturing prey … others live by eating only worms … others feeding on seeds and grains or thorny plants … and others catching ants and flies.
And we shouldn’t forget how important habitat is, for birds and birders alike:
There are those who dwell in wild places, unlike the birds that are always around people. Many birds keep to the mountains, others to the forests, others to rocky places.
Belon also reminds us that many birds exhibit seasonal movements:
There are several birds that habitually change their location: because of the great cold in the mountains, they come down in the winter to live on the fields, then return in the summer both to avoid the heat and to find food. Many also leave fresh water habitats in winter to take up residence on salt water since that does not freeze.
And others are “completely migratory”:
They have a certain time in the year for leaving one place and arriving in another, as if they had set a date…. The swallows, unable to withstand the winter here in Europe because of both the cold and the lack of suitable food, depart for Africa, Egypt, and Arabia, and find the winter there essentially like the summer here, and so have all they need to live by.
The wintertime strategies of swallows were still the subject of lively debate two and a half centuries later, but Belon and his sources had it right.
Belon is also ahead of his time in pointing out the importance to the ornithologist of a thorough knowledge of status and distribution:
Just as many birds are of necessity migratory, at the same time there are those that are unable to ever move from their home. For as one sees that some countries have forests in which unique tree species grow that are not found anywhere else, in the same way there are certain birds living in those areas that could not survive elsewhere even if one were to transport them.
It’s all very modern, isn’t it?
