Pioneering Ornithologists

By Val Shushkewich

Discover how the science of ornithology developed by looking at the lives of 20 famous ornithologists. Entire books have been written about many of these intriguing people. The book is apprximately 350 pages.

The book has four parts:

- Early Explorers (Georg Wilhelm Steller, William Bartram, Meriwether Lewis, Sir John Richardson);

- Early Ornithology (James Graham Cooper, Joel Asaph Allen, Elliott Ladd Coues, William Dutcher, William Brewster);

- Transition to Modern Ornithology (Frank Michler Chapman, Witmer Stone, Arthur Cleveland Bent, William Leon Dawson, Louis Agassiz Fuertes);

- Modern Ornithology (Rudolph Martin Anderson, Arthur Augustus Allen, Alexander Wetmore, Ludlow Griscom, Terence Michael Shortt, Ernst Walter Mayr).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Val Shushkewich
• Release date: Dec 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223018988

Book preview

Material within this book was drawn from many sources and where such sources are known, they have been acknowledged. If any copyright has been accidentally breached, it was unintentional.

COVER IMAGE ADAPTED from the painting Birds in flight by Adriansart at Pixabay.

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PART ONE – EARLY EXPLORERS

"I would not exchange the knowledge of nature which I acquired on this rotten voyage for great wealth."

Georg Wilhelm Steller

(From Ford, Corey, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska, page 179)

Introduction to Part One

The travels of Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746), William Bartram (1739-1823), Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), and Sir John Richardson (1787-1865) were made at a time when the regions they traversed had not previously been explored by scientists interested in describing their flora, fauna, geography, and inhabitants. These voyages were true explorations of lands unknown to non-native peoples.

Georg Steller was a great naturalist who wrote extensively about the nature and native peoples of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands as they existed during the early 1700s. Vitus Jonassen Bering, the Commander of Steller’s expedition, was one of the greatest explorers in history. Bering’s name has since been given to Bering Strait, Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier, and Bering Land Bridge.

William Bartram has been described as the first naturalist who penetrated the dense tropical forests of Florida. William chronicled his journeys in a renowned book, now known by the shortened title Bartram’s Travels. William Bartram’s father, John Bartram, founded Bartram’s Garden in 1728 on the banks of the Tidal Schuylkill River, now in southwest Philadelphia. Bartram’s Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in the United States.

By the 1750s, Philadelphia was becoming a major city and the center of natural history in the United States. Charles Willson Peale opened his Philadelphia Museum in 1784 and it grew quickly. Peale’s Philadelphia Museum contained the largest and most important ornithological collection of its day. It displayed specimens gathered by Peale, his sons, and other naturalists, and included most of the North American bird species known during this period. An 1805 catalog claimed that the bird collection exceeded 760 specimens. For nearly 50 years, Peale and his family filled the museum with hundreds of painted portraits, thousands of natural history specimens, fossils, and curiosities, all of which were exhibited to an international public. Peale’s portraits of leading American figures of the late 18th century are some of the most recognizable and prominent, including portraits of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, William Bartram, etc. As the 19th century advanced, the Peale Museum struggled to maintain its prominence and in 1849 the Peale family sold the museum’s vast natural history collection (except for the portraits) to Phineas T. Barnum and Moses Kimball.

Before the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806 through the Louisiana Territory to the Pacific Ocean, this area of the continent was virtually unknown to science. Jefferson speculated about the size of the animals to be found in the lands west of the Mississippi. The Lewis and Clark Expedition provided the real facts about the flora, fauna, geography, and inhabitants of this region.

Sir John Richardson was the surgeon-naturalist and second-in-command on both of Sir John Franklin’s overland expeditions in 1819-1821 and 1825-1827 to explore the North American Polar Sea. Richardson was the first naturalist to investigate the country through which he travelled to reach the Polar Sea. These expeditions described the difficulties of living in the Barren Grounds of the Canadian Arctic.

Chapter 1 – Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709 – 1746)

Georg Wilhelm Steller was a dedicated, ambitious, and determined self-made naturalist. He excelled in the opportunities he was given and was innovative in figuring out ways to get his job done. He persevered in describing new species despite the ridicule of his co-explorers, who initially could not comprehend the value of what he was doing. Today, he is considered a great ecological naturalist and scientist.

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Fig 1-1 – Georg Steller (Courtesy University of Tyumen, the Center of Russian-German Cooperation of Georg Wilhelm Steller).

Although his journals and his work De Bestiis Marinis (The Beasts of the Sea) were published posthumously, much of the details about his life history would have been lost to the world except for the lifetime quest of a later naturalist, Leonhard Stejneger.

Stejneger dedicated his biography of Georg Wilhelm Steller, published in 1936, as follows: In memory of Spencer Fullerton Baird, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who sent me on the mission which eventually resulted in this book. (1-1) In 1882, Baird sent Stejneger, a promising young naturalist from Norway who had recently arrived in the United States, to Bering Island, where Georg Steller had been marooned. One of Stejneger’s objectives was to see if the Sea Cow or northern manatee, which Steller had described as being in abundance on the island, was indeed extinct. Stejneger spent 18 months on Bering Island and during that time his admiration for Steller’s qualities grew. He paid tribute to Steller’s memory by naming the highest mountain (2,484 feet) on the island, Mount Steller. He also named a prominent rocky gateway, through which Steller must often have walked, ‘Steller’s Triumphal Arch’. (¹-²)

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FIG 1-2 – STELLER’S Triumphal Arch on the western shore of Bering Island. Through this arch he must have walked on his excursion to the Ozernaya River. Photograph by L. Stejneger, 1895.

Stejneger worked at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, first as Curator of Birds and then as the Head Curator for Biology, from 1884 until his retirement many years later. Continuing to study Steller’s writings and researching the developments of his life, he again visited scenes of Steller’s Kamchatka and Alaskan activities on four different occasions. Stejneger acquired so much information that he found himself compelled to write a biography of Steller. He called this biography the plain tale of the life of a great naturalist who during a brief but eventful career achieved immortality by the display of qualities which characterize the true scientist, and says that in the history of American science, Steller truly merits the title ‘The Pioneer of Alaskan Natural History’. (1-3)

Georg Wilhelm Steller was born on 10 March 1709 in Windsheim, Germany. His original last name was Stöhler (the accepted spelling after 1715 became Stöller). (1-4) He later changed his name to Steller after relocating to Russia. Georg attended school in Windsheim and, being a good student, was granted one of the public scholarships for the study of theology at the University of Wittenberg. On 25 September 1729 he said goodbye to his family and journeyed to Wittenberg. They fully expected to meet again in a few years when he would return to Windsheim to become a preacher. However, Georg never returned to his birthplace. Instead, he travelled thousands of miles over land and sea, exploring and describing animals, plants, and birds for science.

Once at the University of Wittenberg, Georg began to attend lectures on anatomy, gradually changing over from the theological to the medical faculty. He also changed universities to the University of Halle. The natural history disciplines were not taught by specialized professors, but by professors of the medical faculty. Botany was covered as part of the science of drugs derived from plants, and zoology was discussed as it related to human anatomy. Something which was later to prove useful to him were the demonstrations in the anatomy theater made on animals, (human cadavers were rarely available). (1-5) Steller spent three years at the University of Halle where he studied, tutored, and taught botany as an unsalaried lecturer. As a step towards obtaining a salaried professorship in botany at the University of Halle, he went to Berlin in 1734 to take an examination and obtain a certificate. He passed the exam, but had to wait to get a position, and his resources were getting low.

At this time, Russia held a great attraction for Central European men of science. The vast extent of Siberia was not yet explored. The Russian Czar, Peter the Great, had instigated great exploratory expeditions, as well as the founding of an Academy of Arts and Sciences in St. Petersburg, which attracted many Central European and Russian scientists.

The explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering had completed the First Kamchatka Expedition of 1725 to 1731 under the orders of Peter the Great which were continued under Peter the Great’s widow, the Empress Anna after Peter’s death in 1725.

Vitus Bering was a Danish cartographer and explorer in Russian service, and an officer in the Russian Navy. Bering’s instructions on this First Kamchatka Expedition were as follows:

There should be built on the Kamchatka [River], or at some other place adjacent, one or two boats with decks.

With these boats [you are directed] to sail along the coast which extends northwards and which is supposed (since no one knows the end of it) to be continuous with America.

And therefore, [you are directed] to seek the point where it connects with America and to go to some settlement under European rule, or if any European vessel is seen, learn of what the coast visited is called, which should be taken down in writing, an authentic account prepared, placed on the chart and brought back here. (1-6)

On this First Kamchatka Expedition, Bering sailed around the northeast corner of Asia and through what is now known as the Bering Strait, thus proving there was water between Asia and America. However, the North American coast was completely hidden in dense fog, so that Bering was unable to see it. On his return he again passed through the Bering Strait in fog and was not aware there was land to the east.

Despite the new knowledge about the northeast coast of Siberia gathered during the First Kamchatka Expedition, Bering had failed to reach North America due to adverse weather. The question of how to connect with the North American continent remained unanswered. Bering was promoted to captain-commander and he proposed a second Kamchatka expedition. His simple plan for the Second Kamchatka Expedition became expanded into Russia’s Great Northern Expedition of 1733 to 1743.

The Russian Admiralty mounted an operation unequaled in the history of polar exploration. The wide-ranging goals of the expedition were to survey the northern coast of the Russian Empire; to search for a sea route to North America and Japan; to open access to Siberian natural resources; and to potentially secure additional Russian sovereignty in the region. With over 3,000 people directly and indirectly involved, the Second Kamchatka Expedition was an enormous exploratory and scientific undertaking, and was one of the largest such projects in history. Although the expedition was under the overall leadership of Vitus Bering, it consisted of separate detachments responsible for exploring different sections of the Arctic or the Pacific coasts.

The Pacific or Maritime group was subdivided into two detachments, with Bering to sail from Okhotsk to search for a land mass north of Japan and then to sail farther east to the coast of North America. The other detachment, under the command of Danish captain Martin Spangberg, was to investigate and chart the sea route from Okhotsk to Japan and China.

In addition to the groups charged with exploration, the academic division, consisting of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences, was to research the plants, animals, and minerals found in the regions to be explored. The participants in the academic portion were answerable to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and not to Vitus Bering, the captain-commander and overall leader of the expedition. The academic component was provided with many astronomical, geodesic, and physical measuring instruments to pursue its research, and the governor of Siberia and the various local authorities were ordered to provide the researchers with all the aid the scientists required. The Academy directed all the researchers to prepare reports in Russian and in Latin.

The goal was to find and map the eastern reaches of Siberia, and hopefully the western shores of North America. The Second Kamchatka Expedition was the most ambitious voyage of discovery the world had yet known. Vitus Bering would be in command and several members of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg were invited to accompany him as far as Kamchatka.

At this time, Steller was attracted to a country which was encouraging the exploration of undiscovered lands and he decided to go to Russia. As he did not have the means to make the trip to St. Petersburg, he volunteered his services as doctor to the Russian Army and accompanied wounded and sick Russian soldiers across the Baltic Sea.

In November 1734, at age 25, Steller arrived in St. Petersburg with no money, no friends, and only his ambition to succeed. He knew only a few Russian words. In St. Petersburg’s Apothecary Garden, he met and conversed in Latin with the aging Archbishop Theophan Prokopovich of Novgorod, whose residence was close by. The archbishop needed constant medical attention, and as Steller was a doctor who was also interested in and knowledgeable about natural history, Theophan asked him to live in the archepiscopal palace as his resident physician and companion. The archbishop came to know and understand Steller’s personality well. He commented about Steller that People may respect a man who is always right, but they love a man who is sometimes wrong. (1-7) Theophan could foresee that all his life Steller would be lonely and disliked by some people.

Steller spent hours in the Academy of Sciences’ superb library. On one memorable visit, he discovered Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first color-plate book of American plants, animals, and birds.

In the St. Petersburg botanic garden Steller met and worked with Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, a German physician, naturalist, and geographer, who was among the first to conduct a scientific exploration of Siberia. Messerschmidt had journeyed in Siberia for nearly eight years and his efforts had permanently exhausted him. Messerschmidt died in 1735, and two years later, Steller fell in love with and married his widow.

Steller was interested in the chance for adventure and accomplishment on the Second Kamchatka Expedition. On the recommendation of Archbishop Theophan, in 1736 the Imperial Senate proposed that Steller be appointed as adjunct professor to the Second Kamchatka Expedition. Steller’s joy was tempered by Theophan’s sudden death on 19 September 1736.

Steller and his wife left St. Peterburg by dog sledge on 15 January 1738, reaching Moscow on the 30th, where his wife decided not to continue the journey. Steller took three years to make the difficult journey from Moscow across Siberia to Okhotsk (some 8,000 kilometers or 5,000 miles). All along the way, he was busy exploring, collecting, dissecting, and writing observations of the plants and animals he found. He wrote all his scientific observations and descriptions in Latin, as he never became proficient at writing in Russian.

Along the way he met Johann Georg Gmelin, one of the professors allocated to the expedition, who decided that Steller could replace himself in exploring Kamchatka and gave him instructions and reference works on botany and zoology.

Crossing the Kamchatka Peninsula, Steller described the difficulties of travelling by dog sledge: In spite of the fact that travel with dogs is very hard and dangerous and more exhausting than walking, as driving the dogs makes oneself tired like a dog, it has the advantage that it is possible in that way to get from one place to another over the most impracticable trails where it would be impossible to pass either with horses or on foot..(1-8)

Steller was tough and indefatigable, and he was passionately in love with nature and science. He was curious about everything. For nine months he lived among the Itelmen on the Kamchatka Peninsula, traveling with his interpreter from one settlement to another. He felt only admiration for these brilliant naturalists. His attention to every aspect of Itelmen life, including the construction of their homes, proved useful to him later. The Itelmen moved seasonally between communal underground dwellings in the winter, and single-family homes that were raised off the ground on stilts during the summer. Steller was impressed by the resourcefulness of the Itelmen, who were so self-sufficient and inventive, making such good use of their plants and animals, that they had little experience of trading with outside people. (1-9)

Steller eagerly sought cures for the deadly condition scurvy from the Kamchadal female shamans, whom he held in high esteem. The women showed him which plants to gather and how to prepare them. Their mixed diet of many roots, plants, and tree bark, including the yellow and black scurvy berries (cloudberry) and (crowberry), and frozen fish eaten raw, prevented scurvy. (1-10)

In 1741 at Avacha Bay on the east cost of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Steller joined Vitus Bering on the ship St. Peter. Bering told Steller that he was not a well man, and it would be a comfort to have someone with Steller’s medical knowledge onboard. The draftsman Frederic Plenisner was assigned to Steller as an artist and Bering agreed to have Steller’s hunter Thoma Lepiklin signed with the crew.

Although Steller shared a cabin with Bering, the two men’s objectives for the voyage were very different – Steller saw the voyage as a great opportunity to investigate the flora and fauna of a previously unexplored land, while Bering was concerned with the difficulties of the voyage, the safety of the crew, and following his orders to locate America. Steller was unable to sympathize with others’ points of view.

The Expedition sailed from Avacha Bay on 4 June 1741. Steller’s note-taking began immediately, with lists of seaweeds and animals observed, which led him to realize that the plants were drifting in an ocean current, since they often moved in a different direction than the wind. Steller pointed this out to others on deck but wrote that they thought his claim about sea currents was ridiculous.

Assisted by westerly winds, in mid-July they finally sighted land. This turned out to be Kayak Island on the southwest coast of Alaska. There was great rejoicing among the men on board ship and Steller was ecstatic. Bering, perhaps worn down from years of pursuing his order to find America, was worried about getting his men back home safely. Here there was a great divide in the mindsets of Bering and Steller. Steller wanted to stay as long as he could to explore this new land with its unlimited possibilities to discover and describe previously unknown nature, while Bering wanted only to return home as soon as possible.

Bering was very cautious in stepping foot on this new land and his first priority was to find a sheltered, safe place to land and obtain fresh drinking water. Accordingly, he set a boat out from the ship for this purpose. Bering refused Steller’s demands to go along. However, he did allow Steller to go ashore with the second boat. Steller raced inland and collected as many plant specimens as he could. His Cossack hunter Thoma brought him a dozen different kinds of birds. The only two Steller recognized among this group of specimens were the Raven and the Black-billed Magpie. (1-11)

Among the birds which Thoma brought him was one which was a single specimen, of which I remember to have seen a likeness painted in lively colors and described in the newest account of the birds and plants of the Carolinas published in French and English, the name of the author of which, however, does not occur to me now. THIS BIRD PROVED TO ME THAT WE WERE IN AMERICA. (¹-¹²) The picture which Steller remembered seeing in a book in the library at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg many years previously was the painting of a Blue Jay in Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. The bird which Steller described had blue feathers with a black head and crest. It was not the Blue Jay but a similar bird and was subsequently named the Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri).

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FIG 1-3 – BLUE JAY on similax. Mark Catesby 1731 – 1743, I: Plate 15, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Under CC0 copyright – free use.

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FIG 1-4 – STELLER’S Jay. Courtesy of Pixabay.

The next day Bering, worried about the weather’s taking a turn for the worst, decided to return to Kamchatka. Scurvy, the terrible disease of early ship voyages, was present on board. On 10 August, the assistant surgeon reported that 21 men had the disease, with five being totally unfit for duty and the rest badly affected. (1-13)

On 29 August, 40 days after departing Kayak Island, the St. Peter made one last stop to take on more water at Nagai Island in the Shumagin Islands. Steller was allowed to go ashore where he found abundant birds. He also collected anti-scorbutic herbs to protect himself against scurvy. He requested that a detail of several sailors be given to his charge for the purpose of collecting enough of these anti-scorbutic herbs for all the men, but his suggestion was denied by the naval officers, who were skeptical of his claim that these herbs prevented scurvy.

Steller wrote in his diary: this important work, which affected the health and lives of all, was not considered worth the labor of a few sailors, I repented of my good intentions, and resolved that in the future I would only look after the preservation of my own self without wasting another word.(1-14) Steller was generally at odds with the officers and crew on the ship, who could not comprehend his scientific curiosity and understanding about the nature of the places they visited.

Steller also located several clear springs on the island. When he found the sailors on the beach filling their casks from the nearest stagnant pool, he tried to get them to stop, but they ignored his objections that the water was brackish and alkaline. Steller insisted on sending a sample of the water to a ship’s officer, who also ignored Steller’s objections. This was a fatal error in judgment and contributed to the ill health and deaths of over a third of the crew. (1-15)

The ship continued sailing westward, south of the Aleutian Island chain. The scurvy situation was increasing to the extent of not having enough men to handle the duties onboard the ship. The weather was bad; it was getting very cold; and snow and fog added to the difficulties. Without being able to see the sun, it was difficult to get an accurate reading of their latitude.

On 5 November, they sighted land. It proved not to be Kamchatka, but what later became known as Bering Island. Their ship was almost crushed on some rocky reefs, and in a storm three weeks later, after the men had moved ashore, the ship was tossed high up on the beach. They were now stranded on the island, with more and more of the men weakened by and eventually succumbing to scurvy.

Many of the men had at first believed they were somewhere on the Kamchatka Peninsula, but Steller did not believe so because the animals on the island (sea otters and blue foxes) showed such fearlessness towards them that he was convinced that this was a land where the animals had not yet become acquainted with man.

Vitus Bering died of heart failure on 8 December 1741 and was buried on the island. Thirty-one of the crew of 77 men died. By the end of December, fresh meat, wholesome water, and the bulbs and roots gathered by Steller were showing their effects, and the scurvy epidemic was checked. Steller cared for the sick men to the best of his ability and the crew came to respect him and to value his advice. The survivors managed to survive the winter on the island by living in improvised dugouts, hunting, and collecting firewood, which was hard to find as there were no trees on the island.

During their time on Bering Island, the sailors began to gamble, using sea otter pelts instead of money. The sea otter has the most beautiful fur in the world. Steller wrote: The poor sea otters...were slaughtered without necessity and consideration only for their skins, their meat being thrown away. (1-16)

Steller made many discoveries in ornithology, mammalogy, and botany during the months on Bering Island. He saw and described the bright eider which was later named Steller’s Eider (Polysticta stelleri). This duck was abundant at sea off Bering Island and in April he described their vast rafts amassed offshore prior to their northward migration. Steller noted that the color of the eider ducks was generally white, with brown underparts as though they had skidded through the mud. They were extremely shy and flew at terrific speed, outdistancing any other duck. Steller's eider is a migratory Arctic diving duck that breeds along the coastlines of eastern Russia and Alaska. It is the rarest, smallest, and fastest flying of the eider species. Despite its name, it is only distantly related to all other extant eider species and was separated from other eider species into its own genus in 1945 due to its behavioral and anatomical differences. It is most closely related to the extinct Labrador duck.

Steller also described and collected samples of the Tufted Puffin, Parakeet Auklet, Crested Auklet, and Steller’s Albatross. He discovered a flightless, spectacled cormorant, which at the time was exceedingly common, although by 1850 it had been exterminated due to ruthless hunting.

Steller described the Sea Cow, or northern manatee in detail. He saw these mammals feeding along the shore of the island eating seaweed. They were huge – up to 30 feet long and probably weighing more than three tons. He described their rough outer skin, which looked like the bark of an old oak, and the horny plates of their gums, which served to masticate their food in the absence of teeth. He described their behavior as follows: They keep the half-grown and young in front of them when pasturing and are very careful to guard them in the rear and on the sides when traveling, always keeping them in the middle of the herd.(1-17)

The Sea Cow was the only vegetarian among the mammals Steller described and he described four kinds of seaweed that it ate. He noticed that after they fed along the shore, uneaten roots and stems of these species washed ashore. He described the Sea Cow’s companionable habits, mating, care for young, and external parasites, which sea gulls picked from their half-submerged bodies as they fed. Because