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RUFFLED FEATHERS Uncovering the biggest scandal in the bird world. From The New Yorker On a wintry avening in January, the Smithsonian threw a book party in the Castle—a turreted folly on the Mall, in Washington, D.C.—to celebrate Pamela Rasmussen's monumental new work, "Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide," which had recently been published, in two volumes, by the Smithsonian and Lynx Edicions. The book, illustrated by John Anderton and other artists, puts the highest standards of professional orithology into a form that an amateur can use in bird-watching, bridging a schism between professional and mateur bird-lovers that has existed for almost a century. Rasmussen examined everything that is known about birds in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Maldives—she measured, described and plotted range maps for most of the fourteen hundred and forty-one species, serving as sole judge in hundreds of difficult decisions about which birds to include on the final list. Along the way, she negotiated many othe robstacles, including the death, in 2001, of S. Dillon Ripley, a grand old man of American ornithology, who was the book's originator and guiding spirit. Most spectacularly, he research helped lead to the unraveling of the greatest ornithological fraud ever committed—a convoluted skein of theft and data falsification that was perpetrated by the late British ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. Click here to read the rest of Ruffled Feathers. (1mb pdf)
Copyright © John Seabrook 2006. All rights reserved
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