Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk

by Austin L. Rand

Overview

From the INTRODUCTION.

In looking back over the preparation of these sketches I feel as though each evening I'd gathered up the bits and pieces left over from the day's work and fashioned them into designs for my own amusement and the edification of my family. Truly it's as though I'd used stray feathers, fallen from the bird skins I'd handled, and fitted them together into something of wider interest than the original.

Much of my work now is museum research, working with bird specimens and books. In fashioning a research paper I always amass a great deal more material, that is to say,

information and ideas, than I am able to use in it. In place of a lumber room I have a set of files with index headings that range from Abundance and Age, through such headings as Beauty, Feathering of Feet, Fictitious, Hysteria, Pterylography, Social, Song, Tail Feathers, Valentine's Day, to Zoogeography. Here I put the information that is irrelevant at the moment but too interesting to discard.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162466208
Publisher:	Anthony Bly
Publication date:	09/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Austin L. Rand, (16 December 1905 – 6 November 1982) was a Canadian zoologist.

He was born in Kentville, Nova Scotia in 1905 and grew up in nearby Wolfville, where he was mentored by the noted local ornithologist Robie W. Tufts. He received a Bachelor of Science from Acadia University, an institution which also awarded him an honorary DSc degree in 1961.

In 1929, while still a graduate student at Cornell University, he travelled on an expedition to Madagascar as collector of birds. Rand published the results as his thesis for his Ph.D.. It was on this expedition that he met Richard Archbold, zoologist and philanthropist, with whom he became a lifelong friend. Archbold subsequently financed and led a series of biological expeditions to New Guinea in the 1930s in which Rand participated and co-led. In 1941 he assisted Archbold in the establishment of the Archbold Biological Station at Lake Placid, Florida, a place he retired to.

In 1942, Rand became assistant zoologist at the National Museum of Canada, now the Canadian Museum of Nature, where he worked with ornithologist Percy A. Taverner and mammalogist Rudolph Martin Anderson. From 1947 to 1955, he was curator of birds at the Field Museum in Chicago and was chief Curator of Zoology there from 1955 to 1970.