The forgotten science: a role for natural history in the twenty-first century?*

Abstract

to natural philosophers who sought to explain the workings of nature as worldly processes decipherable through rational analysis. Gilbert White, Carl Linne, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and Alfred R. Wallace, among others, looked to nature as the motivating force on earth and sought to better understand how the components of nature operated in a worldly setting, distinct from the mystical interventions of a deity. Many of these men were enthralled by the wonders of nature and were practicing naturalists. Certainly it was the physical beauty of birdlife and bird song that helped draw humankind into the study of nature then as it does today. Today, most practicing biologists grew up with a love of nature and, in many instances, it was this predilection that led them ultimately to the pursuit of science. I can trace my conversion from young citizen to novice naturalist in the late 1950s, when I saw, for the first time, a resplendent adult male Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) high on a dead limb in a park in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. It was a warm summer's evening and my family was enjoying an evening picnic. Hearing the sound of the male's call, I looked up to see the striking red, black, and white of its plumage and was transported. My passion for woodpeckers was further fueled by the words and images in Arthur Cleveland Bent's Life Histories of North American