Simply Niko

From the early days (1950s and 1960s) of scientific, experiment based animal behaviour study, two names stand out: Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.  I read Lorenz's On Aggression years ago, and was suitably impressed, and everyone knows of his pioneering work with geese.  But I had never read anything about Tinbergen, so finding a copy of Curious Naturalists was too good an opportunity to miss.

This is very much a book for the interested amateur, and it covers the ground in an engaging, anecdotal style, with a lot of variety in the material used.  But it was published in 1958, and it bears all the hallmarks of that in its style - very slightly patronising on occasion, and jolly enthusiastic in a chap like way on others.  There is little human warmth in it, but a lot of interesting natural history - ranging from bee hunting wasps (top picture, the so called "bee wolf wasp") in the Netherlands, to snow buntings and phalaropes in Greenland, and various studies of birds, butterflies and other insects  which use either camouflage or distraction colours and patterns.  Camouflage in peppered moths, and how it can be affected by industrialisation, was a famous study at the time, illustrated below - in a staged photograph for a text book (staged for practical reasons - the difficulty of taking this for real with the equipment of the 1950s can be imagined; its not meant to deceive, because the moths' wings are spread out, which is unnatural; but they illustrate the point, in spite of later criticism of the method).  For me, perhaps the most chapters were those in which he described his famous work on the behaviours of black-headed gulls, and on how birds learn to find camouflaged caterpillars.

The other very striking thing about the science Tinbergen describes is how manual it is.  There are no computers, and a lot of the techniques were in their infancy, so the researchers were making it up as they went along, with an approach to making things which would have done Blue Peter proud - including constructing fake trees (to test wasps' navigational skills),  building a frame in which you can move a wasps' nest in loose sand, and many other models of birds, insects et cetera.  They had a fairly robust attitude to their subjects, not hesitating to capture them and mark them with ink, or to make them look in vain for their nests for an extended period, or even temporarily blinding them (don't ask how you do this to a wasp!).  In the most impressive feat of all, his researchers wanted to find out exactly which part of a distasteful caterpillar was unpleasant to birds - so they offered them a puree of its insides, without the skin - they liked that, whereas they couldn't abide the whole animal; so they took the caterpillars and shaved them (!), to see if it ws the skin or the hairs that were unpleasant (it was the hairs).  That's what I call dedication to duty.

Comments

[Cornflower]

V. good title!