Concrete Ornithology

MY YEAR OF DARWIN (#YEAROFDARWIN)

4 Jan 2014: ""I do not believe that any one could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds" CD autobiography

As a college student, Darwin developed a love for shooting and had his gun at Cambridge, where he was studying theology. In his college dorm, he would practice in front of a mirror and would shoot at candles with just the cap. The cap is filled with a powder that fires under compression and sends the fire to the main charge. Just firing the cap creates enough pressure to create a puff of air at the end of the barrel. Darwin used this puff of air to blow out a candle held by a friend - obviously a very good friend. This practice would serve him well as he toured the world and collected birds. 

Though collecting birds sounds like a hobby, it is the term used to describe the practice of killing and stuffing birds. In Darwin's day the product was a bird that would be put into a museum and not rot since all the tissue that easily breaks down has been removed. In fact, Darwin's birds that he collected are still in museums and can be used for study (though I don't know how easily they can be accessed). Today, birds are still collected and we store stomach contents, muscle and other tissue for DNA. A smaller number of birds are pickled or skeletonized. The number of birds collected is typically a fraction of a percent of the birds that are killed by other means (e.g., free-roaming cats). A recent paper in Nature puts collecting into perspective.