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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On a wintry evening in January, the Smithsonian threw a book party in the Castle--a turreted folly on the Mall, in Washington, D.C.--to celebrate Pamela Rasmussen's monumental new work, "Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide," which had recently been published, in two volumes, by the Smithsonian and Lynx Edicions. The book, illustrated by John Anderton and other artists, puts the highest standards of professional ornithology into a form that an amateur can use in bird-watching, bridging a schism between professional and amateur bird-lovers that has existed for almost a century. Rasmussen examined everything that is known about birds in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Maldives--she measured, described, and plotted range maps for most of fourteen hundred and forty-one species, serving as sole judge in hundreds of difficult decisions about which birds to include on the final list. Along the way, she negotiated many other obstacles, including the death, in 2001, of S. Dillon Ripley, a grand old man of American ornithology, who was the book's originator and guiding spirit. Most spectacularly, her research helped lead to the unravelling of the greatest ornithological fraud ever committed--a convoluted skein of theft and data falsification that was perpetrated by the late British ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.
At the party, Rasmussen mingled shyly with the clubby, moneyed world that used to dominate natural history, and still lingers in ornithology. David Challinor, Harvard '43, now eighty-five years old and a senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian, greeted her by saying, "Marvellous, Pam, marvellous. You stayed with it." Rasmussen smiled and nodded, a bit stiffly. She is keenly aware of the differences between her own upbringing, in Oregon, and that of the East Coast scientist-aristocrats she has come to know at the Smithsonian. Rasmussen is forty-seven years old and stands six feet tall in her high heels. She has Nordic features and wide-set pale-blue eyes. She sometimes appears startled when you address her, as though she'd been thinking about something else. As she made her way around the room, colleagues from the Smithsonian praised her extraordinary ability to notice tiny details about bird specimens that other researchers miss, a condition Rasmussen herself diagnoses as "attention-surplus disorder." Bruce Beehler, a former co-worker, said, "Very few younger researchers have Pam's ability to stay focussed on one thing, one specimen, for hours and hours. They need ten things happening at once."
Conversation returned several times during the evening to Colonel Meinertzhagen, who died in 1967. Meinertzhagen enjoyed a formidable reputation in international ornithology. He was a chairman of the British Ornithologists' Club, and the recipient of a Godman-Salvin Medal, one of the highest honors in British birding. His unorthodox methods and surprising finds had been the subject of rumor during his lifetime, but there was never any substantiated accusation of fraud. Three largely adulatory biographies of Meinertzhagen have been published since his death--one by a soldier, one by a professional game hunter, and one by a birder. "Duty, Honor, Empire" (1970), by John Lord, and "Warrior" (1998), by Peter Hathaway Capstick, don't say anything about fraud. Mark Cocker's "Richard Meinertzhagen: Soldier, Scientist and Spy" (1989) does consider many of the rumors, but ultimately rejects them. It wasn't until more than thirty years after his death, when circumstances brought Meinertzhagen to the notice of an unusually attentive researcher, that the extent of his deception was revealed.
One day in 1967, when Rasmussen was eight, her father, Dr. Chester Murray Rasmussen, came into her room, glanced contemptuously at the dolls she and her younger sister, Sally, were playing with, and said, "Why don't you girls get interested in something useful?" Her father was an osteopath, and Pam remembers him as "the biggest man you had ever seen." He spent a lot of time in his basement den, which he had decorated with the heads of animals that he had killed on hunting trips. (A few years later, Dr. Rasmussen deserted the family.) Pam's mother, Helen, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist, let the children know that she disapproved of what he was doing down there. "Sinning," was how Pam understood it.
A couple of days after that encounter, Pam's mother bought her the junior edition of Oliver Austin's "Birds of the World," illustrated by Arthur Singer. Pam had never thought much about birds before, but she quickly became obsessed with the pictures in the book. "I just thought the way the birds looked was so wonderful," she said. She tried to get her sister interested, too. "Pam would open the book and say, 'O.K., which of the birds on this page do you like best?' " Sally told me. "Then she'd do the same thing for the next page--all the way through the book."
After poring over the illustrations, Pam went out to the marsh behind the house, which was situated about twenty miles west of Portland, and recognized a bird--a long-billed marsh wren. "Now that I knew its name, it was thrilling," she said. She had bird-watching birthdays at the Oregon beach, in October. "There we'd be, with Pam, freezing, looking for ducks," Sally, who is now a financial writer, said. For gifts, Rasmussen always wanted bird books. (If it was an expensive book, like the first edition of "Parrots of the World," by Joseph M. Forshaw, it had to cover two or three gift opportunities.) In addition to looking at the pictures, Rasmussen studied the text of these books carefully--except for the chapters entitled "Fossil Birds." Her mother told her not to read those.
At Walla Walla College, an Adventist institution in Washington State where Rasmussen spent six years, earning her master's in biology in 1983, evolution was not taken seriously. "Except," she said, "when we learned what was wrong with it." It wasn't until Rasmussen reached the University of Kansas, where she did her dissertation on cormorants in Patagonia, receiving a Ph.D. in 1990, that she studied Darwin in depth. "It wasn't like the scales fell from my eyes," she said. "You don't really need Darwin to be interested in bird diversity, which is what fascinates me. You need him to explain it." Compared to the theory of natural selection, religion came to seem silly, Rasmussen says, although her mother still hopes she will return to the fold.
Rasmussen entered the job market in the early nineties, just as molecular biology was beginning to emerge as a new way of doing avian systematics--the naming, description, and classification of birds. Morphology (the study of form and structure) was being superseded by molecular genetics, but Rasmussen wanted to study birds, not bird code. Owing in part to the peculiarly preDarwinian circumstances of her education, she wanted a job that would let her do what the nineteenth-century ornithologists had done: travel widely, observe and collect birds, and work with specimens in museums. In 1992, Rasmussen found that job, as the assistant to S. Dillon Ripley, the former secretary of the Smithsonian. Ripley's maternal great-grandfather, Sidney Dillon, had been the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and young Dillon cultivated his interest in birds on the family's estate, in Litchfield, Connecticut. When he was a young man, he made several expeditions to India, in the grand style, meeting dignitaries while collecting birds. As a professional ornithologist, he wrote a tenvolume tome on the birds of India with the renowned Indian ornithologist Salim Ali. The Indian subcontinent, because of its turbulent political history and localized record keeping, was one of the last regions on earth where the avifauna was still not fully catalogued. Now, as his final project, Ripley wanted to produce a field guide that would be the last word on the subject.
In determining which birds to include on the final species list, Ripley was strongly predisposed in favor of museum specimens, and against photographs...
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