At 6:03 pm President Barbara Saunders called the meeting of the Society to order. Vice-President Lydia Thomas introduced Rick Wright, author and tour leader for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. His talk, “Sex, Science, and the Way We Bird Today,” explored the origins of the current division between the largely amateur pursuit of birding, whose emphasis is on the identification of birds and the collection of lists, and the scientific discipline of ornithology. This distinction arose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as a reaction to the popularity of several books on birds written by female authors, including “Birds Through an Opera Glass” by Florence A. Merriam, “Bird Ways” by Robin Thorne Miller and “Bird Neighbors” by Neltje Blanchan. Although these and others were well reviewed by professional journals, such as The Auk, and contained a wealth of information about bird habits and habitat, they could be criticized for their occasional sentimentality and moral judgments. As a reaction to their perceived shortcomings, Robert Ridgway published “A Manual of North American Birds” in 1896. This book emphasized systematics as the only true scientific approach to ornithology, in contrast to the more popular natural histories just described. Although this distinction was criticized at the time, the idea gained ground that the only true scientific endeavor was the ability to identify birds accurately. Ludlow Griscom, and Roger Tory Peterson with his Field Guides, continued this trend, with its competitive male-dominated ethos. Rick pointed out what we would now call politically incorrect statements in Peterson’s influential “How to Know the Birds.” He also noted the ruler present inside the back cover of the Field Guides. Because living birds are to be identified by field marks alone, the ruler is of no practical use, but may be a symbol of the perceived scientific seriousness of the guide and its user. Rick’s talk, which emphasized the contributions of the earlier women authors, ended with acknowledging the painstaking observational work of Margaret Morse Nice, one of the founders of the modern science of animal behavior.
At 7:31 pm President Saunders reconvened the meeting. Recording Secretary Hamish Young read the Minutes of the December 11tth 2018 meeting. They were approved as read. Vice-President Thomas announced two new candidates for membership, William Yates sponsored by Diane Elliot and Mary Braza sponsored by Mary Beth Kooper. The nominations were approved unanimously. President Saunders reminded members that the Society needed to appoint new Field Trips organizers for the 2019-2020 season, that members should pay their dues to Treasurer Ruth Hart, and that the Annual Dinner is on March 12th, 2019, at which the Eisenmann medal will be awarded to Peter Pyle. The fund for the Archival Cabinets has reached its half-way goal. Tax-deductible donations are still needed to reach the final total. President Saunders also advertised upcoming field trips to Croton Point Park, Jones Beach and Pelham Bay Park. Web and Outreach Committee chair Sherry Felix made a plea for articles and reviews for the website.
After the business section of the meeting, President Saunders introduced Lee Dugatkin, Professor and University Scholar at the University of Louisville. His talk,“How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog),” described the extraordinary efforts of Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut to use artificial selection to recreate a dog-like canid from the silver fox. In 1958, Belyaev, a decorated war hero of the Red Army in World War II, and a geneticist who trained at the Ivanova Institute in Moscow, was posted to the new science city, Akademgorodok, outside Novosibirsk, in the wilderness of Siberia. He was put in charge of the Central Research Laboratory of Fur-bearing Animals, a prestigious post as the fur trade was a significant source of hard currency for the Soviet Union. Despite the prevailing Lamarkian views of Trofim Lysenko, who was a scientific fraud but extremely influential politically, Belyaev set about a bold experiment in domestication. The hypothesis was that by selecting and breeding from the calmest and friendliest animals, not only would the silver fox become domesticated, but also the offspring would begin to show other features of the so-called Domestication Syndrome, a collection of physical and behavioral traits common to all domesticated species, regardless of their uses to humankind. These traits include floppy ears, curly tails, white forehead chevrons, more juvenile facial features, and a lack of fear and even friendliness towards humans. After Lyudmila Trut was recruited from Moscow State University, she set about finding a suitable venue for the breeding experiments, finally settling on Lesno fox farm some distance from Akademgorodok. Of the 10,000 breeding silver foxes present on the farm, five hundred were selected according to a set of rules regarding their behavior, and the calmest were crossed. Within two generations, some kits could be held by their handlers, and in succeeding generations, kits began showing characteristics of the Domestication Syndrome, such as tail wagging and whining, curly tails, floppy ears and even licking the hands of the researchers. By the fifteenth generation, stress hormones were 50% lower in the selected animals and females had two periods of oestrus. At that point the investigators did the key experiment to show that the changes were inherited and not caused by learned behavior. Transplants of “calm” embryos to aggressive females and “aggressive” embryos to calm females, showed unambiguously that the traits were inherited. Further selection made a truly dog-like fox, with behavioral and physical traits identical to the domestic dog. Recent DNA sequence data have shown that the changes on chromosome 12 of the domesticated dog-like fox have their counterparts on the homologous regions of dog chromosomes 11, 35 and 5. Belyaev and Trut had succeeded in domesticating a wild canid in less than 1/100th of the time taken for the domestication of the dog, a truly remarkable accomplishment.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:53 pm.
Respectfully submitted by
Hamish Young, Recording Secretary