The origin of modern ornithology in Europe

Abstract

During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, ornithology was deeply subdivided into systematic ornithology and field ornithology (natural history of birds). In the early 1920s, Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972) in Berlin, Germany, initiated the integration of both branches into a unified New Avian Biology through a change of the editorial policy of Journal für Ornithologie and through the publication of his large volume Aves (1927–1934) in Handbuch der Zoologie which became the founding document of modern ornithology in central Europe (“Stresemann revolution”). It was quickly recognized that birds are well suited for studies into the problems of functional morphology, physiology, ecology, behaviour, and orientation of animals. The “Stresemann revolution” went unnoticed in Great Britain, where the established editorial policy of the leading ornithological journal, The Ibis, from the 1920s to the mid-1940s was to publish articles based on a traditional definition of science, fact-gathering rather than answering open questions. Several authors who had published biological studies since 1900 remained on the fringes of British ornithology. One of these was David Lack (1910–1973) who, during the mid-1940s, was able to introduce the New Avian Biology to the United Kingdom against the resistance of the majority of conservatively minded older British ornithologists. As his own contributions to the New Avian Biology, Lack added the broad fields of evolutionary ecology and population biology of birds which, under his leadership, became the major research topics of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford.