Jonathan Dwight

Jonathan Dwight V. (born December 8, 1858 in New York City , † January 22, 1929 there ) was an American doctor and ornithologist .

Live and act

Jonathan Dwight came from an old Puritan family on his father's side, and on his mother's side of immigrants from the Netherlands who had settled in Manhattan long ago. He was born on December 8, 1858, in his grandmother's house in New York, to Jonathan and Julia Lawrence (Hasbrouck) Dwight. He grew up in his parents' home in Madison , New Jersey , and attended the Madison Classical Institute there for three years . In New York he received private lessons for some time and went to Harvard University from 1876 . There he attended the meetings of the Nutall Ornithological Club . He had already been interested in birds before, but now this interest became increasingly scientific. He had started collecting bird eggs since 1872, and since 1878 he has also collected nests and hides, which he prepared with great skill and accurately labeled. Within a short time his collection grew to 110 specimens from 65 species. From 1879 he began to publish smaller ornithological messages.

In 1880 he graduated from Harvard and took a contract with his father, who was a civil engineer in railroad construction. This led him to Florida, where he fell seriously ill in the spring of 1881 and was not able to resume work until 1883. On the side, however, he had continued his collecting activity. On September 26 of the same year he was elected partner at the founding event of the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU).

In the following five years he devoted himself to work and ornithologist alike, making trips to New Brunswick , Nova Scotia , Prince Edward Island and Québec . In 1889 he joined the 7th New York Regiment of the National Guard and was trained as a rifle shooter. Due to his work in the medical corps, he developed an interest in medicine, so that he soon began studying medicine at Columbia University , which he graduated in 1893.

In addition to his work for the New York Hospital and the Vanderbilt Clinic , he then had a private practice for a few years before he retired into private life in favor of ornithological work. He now purposefully completed his collections and procured his material even under difficult conditions. He dealt extensively with plumage and corridors and was thus able to gain decisive knowledge about moulting sequences, which he published in his treatise The sequence of plumages and moults of the passerine birds of New York from 1900. In doing so, he refuted the prevailing view that plumage would change due to pigment changes in the fully grown feathers. Dwight devoted himself to the critical investigation of subspecies and was due to his expertise, the authoritative body in the Committee for Classification and Nomenclature of the AOU

His collection soon grew beyond the available space, so that from 1904 he first moved parts to the American Museum , from 1906 to a building owned by his friend ornithologist Louis Bennett Bishop in New Haven . He himself had a comprehensive collection. In 1909, space became scarce here too, so that the museum again made larger rooms available. These became a much-used place of work for ornithologists, and the museum left almost all of the collecting activities for North American species to Dwight in order to use its own capacities to expand a South American collection. Dwight later completed it by buying collections from Central America. At the time of his death, his collections comprised around 65,000 hides, nests and eggs, most of which he bequeathed to the American Museum and some to the Springfield Museum . Its ornithological library was also unique.

Dwight was Treasurer of the AOU from 1903 to 1920, then became Vice President and from 1923 to 1926 President. He was also active in the National Audubon Society and sat the Linnean Society of New York , from which he was honored shortly before his death.

Dwight was married twice. He married his first wife Georgina Gertrude Rundle in 1901. She died in 1903. He married his second wife, Ethel Gordon Wishart Adam, in 1914.

Works (selection)

• The sequence of plumages and moults of the passerine birds of New York , Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 13, 1900, pp. 73-360
• Description of a new race of the Lesser Black-backed Gull from the Azores , American Museum Novitates 44, pp. 1-2, New York 1922, PDF
• The gulls (Laridae) of the world; their plumages, moults, variations, relationships and distribution , Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 52, Art. 3, pp. 63-401, New York 1925

literature

• James Henry Fleming: In Memoriam: Jonathan Dwight . In: The Auk . tape 47 , no. 1 , 1930, p. 1–6 ( online [PDF; 311 kB ; accessed on July 25, 2011]).