Word: ornithologist
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...real genius is as a storyteller. He's like an omniscient, many-armed Hindu god of anecdotes: he plucks them from every imaginable field of human endeavor. The art historian who can instantly spot a forgery that fooled a battery of scientific tests but can't explain why. The ornithologist can identify at 200 yards an exotic bird he's never seen in flight before. The psychologist who has catalogued the 10,000 expressions of which the human face is capable. Gladwell hangs with superstar car salesmen and emergency-room cardiologists, badass battlefield commanders and improv-comedy troupes. He even...
James Watson remembers cringing when his colleague Francis Crick announced to regulars at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge, England, that they had discovered "the secret of life." True, the onetime ornithologist and the former physicist had created a plausible model for the structure of DNA that morning. If they were right, biologists would finally understand how parents pass characteristics on to their children--not only hair and eye color but every aspect of how the human body is built and how it operates. Watson, at left in photo, and Crick would have solved the mysteries of heredity...
...extinction. The list of 201 species includes the cerulean warbler, which has an Appalachian habitat threatened by mining, and the painted bunting, whose brushland habitat has been gobbled up by sprawl and farming. The decrease in birds isn't good news for humankind, says the Audubon's chief ornithologist, Frank Gill, since birds are indeed the canaries in the global coal mine. "Birds are one of our best indicators of environmental and other problems that can affect humans as well," Gill says. The West Nile virus, he notes, turned up in birds before it reached humans. --By Rebecca Winters
Warm weather is the culprit behind the birds’ unusually large and noisy presence on campus, according to Douglas Causey, senior vertebrate biologist and ornithologist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology...
DIED. S. DILLON RIPLEY, 87, blue-blooded ornithologist and eighth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who from 1964 to 1984 transformed an assortment of staid displays into a vibrant, far-reaching complex of fun and education; in Washington. In 1968, when the directors wanted to close the museums during the Poor People's March after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Ripley decided instead to keep them open even later so the marchers could at least go in and use the rest rooms...