I discovered Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists as a student. I was reading psychology and the course had just begun with a look at animal behaviour, which involved a grasp of scientific method and thus a lot of headache-inducing maths. In a bookshop, glumly casting round for some background reading with a lighter touch than the papers I’d been given, I happened on this remarkable book, published surprisingly by Country Life. It was about seagulls, savage wasps, camouflage and other matters now suddenly on my agenda but, because it was for ordinary readers rather than specialists, the ordeals of theory, statistical bafflement and so forth were wonderfully absent. There were plenty of intriguing illustrations too, many of them really quite odd. In one, a man in a floppy hat was presenting a real butterfly with a paper butterfly on the end of a thread. In another, a stuffed fox was being towed by a jeep towards a colony of gulls. Over time I came to relish the contrast between Heath Robinson arrangements like these and the strange truths they could uncover. Even right there in the shop I got a glimpse of the fun there could be in ingenious detective work . . .
Grant McIntyre on Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists and The Herring Gull’s World (Issue 19)
