After what seems like a long wait, for me at least, today marks the official publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship! I received my advance copies on Friday, an event that Karin commemorated with a short unboxing video:
It’s been a long journey from pitching the initial idea to Pelagic Publishing back in early 2021, through the various drafts that have culminated in the finished book. As you can see from the images on this post and the endorsements on the publisher’s web site, Birds & Flowers has so far been warmly received. I hope that future reviews are as positive!
A few people have asked me what’s next. In fact I have definite plans (as in topics, provisional titles, the start of chapter structure, and even some initial writing) for three more books. The next one is actually about half written, but then I have been working at it, on and off, for 30 years! Watch this space for more details…
In the shorter term, Karin and I are returning (permanently) to the UK at the start of March. We’ve enjoyed our time in Denmark, it’s been a fun two and a half years, but we’re missing our immediate family plus we both have some interesting work possibilities to pursue. In mid-April I will be going to China for three months to work with my colleague Zong-Xin Ren at the Kunming Institute of Botany. I’ll be sure to blog about my adventures there!
In the meantime, if you buy my book or borrow it from the library or from a friend, please let me know what you think in the comments section below.
In the run up to release of my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, my publisher, Pelagic, has updated the book description and provided a preview of some of the pages and colour plates – follow this link to view them. On that page you can also pre-order the book direct from Pelagic Publishing, who will ship worldwide, or it’s available from many of the online book sellers.
I’m really excited to be sharing this with the readers of my blog and can’t wait for publication day! Early in 2024 I hope to do some talks, online and in person, to promote the book – so watch this space.
With best wishes to you all and hopes for a peaceful, and more sustainable, New Year.
Obviously the title of this post is click-bait, as there’s LOTS of things that I wish more people knew about pollination! But here’s one that really gets my (Yule) goat.
I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve read statements in books and research papers such as “bees collect lots of pollen from flowers therefore they are good pollinators”. Even worse, I sometimes see studies where pollen has been removed from “pollen baskets” or other scopae, then used as a measure of the importance of those bees as pollinators.
In both cases it seems to have been forgotten that bees are collecting pollen to feed their larvae and pollen that ends up in scopae is generally not available for pollination.
That’s the purpose of the Venn diagram at the top of this short post, to remind us that there can be a disconnect between what bees are doing and what plants require: foraging for pollen only partly correlates with flower pollination. Indeed, the same argument applies to any animal that feeds itself or its young on pollen, including pollen wasps (Maserinae), Heliconia butterflies, and some flower-visiting hoverflies, birds and bats.
It’s not only loss of pollen from reproduction that’s important here: depending on the size and behaviour of the bees relative to the shape and size of the flower, they may go nowhere near the stigma, so even if they are carrying viable pollen, it can be lost as far as the plant is concerned.
Note also that many bee species will collect pollen from wind-pollinated plants such as grasses, oaks, etc. Indeed in some species the availability of such pollen is extremely important – see Manu Saunders’ review on this topic and more recent papers that cite it. Again, it emphasises the partial disconnect between pollen collecting by bees and pollination of flowers by bees.
Assessing which flower visitors are actually pollinators is not technically demanding but it can be time consuming. The minimum that you need is single visit deposition (SVD) experiments in which you expose unvisited flowers to one visit by the potential pollinator. Then you assess how much pollen has landed on the stigma or (better) whether the visit results in seed set.
If you want to know more about the evidence that’s required to determine if a flower visitor is or is not a pollinator, they are codified in the “Cox-Knox Postulates” that I discuss in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society.
Books are never perfect. In the run-up to publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, I am all too aware that this is a truth that’s a cause of anxiety, and sometimes sleeplessness, for all authors. One category of imperfection is tipographical* errors have been introduced at some point in the process of writing and editing. In the past these were corrected in the first edition of a book by the inclusion of errata slips, and such errors are sometimes important in determining the true first editions of older books. On page 20 of the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example, there is a misspelling of the word “species”**. This was corrected in the second edition but is an important marker of an extremely valuable book, intellectually and (now) commercially.
A second category involves errors of fact or interpretation or expression that, with hindsight and reader feedback, require correction, or at least acknowledgement, by the author. These are the ones that really make an author squirm inside, even though we know that they are inevitable: we are, after all only human.
It turns out that there are a few examples of both categories in the first edition of my 2021 book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. Some of them have been corrected in the second edition, but if you purchased the first edition then these are what you should look out for:
P22 – ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony later in the season’ changes to: ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony from spring onwards.’
P30, Fig 2.9 – Correct ‘Tabaernemontana’ to Tabernaemontana
P51, Figure 3.8 – title – it should read C. rhynchantha [there’s an h missing]
P57 – ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is on his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks through the garden.’ changes to ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is near his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks in the area.’***
P146 – ‘I’ve even see them attack and kill honey bees’ should read: ‘I’ve even seen them….’
P169 – in the title for Figure 10.5, Anon (2019) should be Anon (1919) [in some presentation copies of my book I have corrected this and initialed the change]
P259 – this reference: Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Fruit set of highland coffee increases with the diversity of pollinating bees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270: 955–961. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2306.
Should be replaced by:
Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea arabica and C. canephora (Rubiaceae). American Journal of Botany 90, 153– 157. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2664.2003.00847.x
The last two have yet to be corrected and will need to wait for the third edition:
P119 – the Rader et al. study did not include birds and bats, just insects.
P262 – “Nabhan, G.P. and Buchmann, S.” should read “Buchmann, S. and Nabhan, G.P.”
That final error is really embarrassing because, as I point out in the chapter ‘The Politics of Pollination’, their book The Forgotten Pollinators was an inspirational one for stimulating research and action around pollinator conservation! I can offer no explanation for why the order of the authors got reversed in my head.
My sincere thanks to those readers who pointed out some of these errors. My hope is that Birds & Flowers has fewer, but I may be fooling myself…
*You see what I did there?
**Proof-reading is boring and soul-destroying for any author, but really Mr Darwin?!
***If there is an after-life, I’d like to think that Darwin’s now enjoying this error after my snarky comment in the second footnote. To which I’ll respond: watch out for a doozy of a footnote about a Darwin footnote in Birds & Flowers!
Today I returned the final, edited files of the book manuscript to the publisher. It’s been a long summer of ‘fine distinctions and nice judgements’, to quote my editor, the inimitable Hugh Brazier. Now that’s all finalised, I thought that it was time to share the chapter titles with you – here goes:
Introduction: Encounters with birds and flowers
1 Origins of a partnership
Understanding 50 million years of bird and flower evolution
2 Surprising variety
The astounding diversity of pollinating birds
3 Keeping it in the family
Accounts of the different groups of bird pollinators
4 A flower’s point of view
How many plants are bird-pollinated, and where are they found?
5 In the eye of the beholder
What do bird flowers look like?
6 Goods and services
The enticements given to birds for pollinating flowers
7 Misaligned interests
The ongoing conflicts between flowers and birds
8 Senses and sensitivities
How bird brains shape the flowers that they pollinate
9 Codependent connections
Networks of interacting flowers and birds
10 Hitchhikers, drunks and killers
The other actors in the network and how they affect the main players
11 The limits to specialisation
How ‘specialised’ are the relationships between birds and flowers?
12 Islands in the sea, islands in the sky
Isolation, in oceans or in mountains, results in some remarkable interactions
13 The curious case of Europe
Why did we believe that Europe had no bird-pollinated flowers?
14 ‘After the Manner of Bees’
The origins of our understanding of birds as pollinators, and their cultural associations
15 Feathers and fruits
Birds as pollinators of edible wild plants and domesticated crops
16 Urban flowers for urban birds
Bird pollination in cities and gardens
17 Bad birds and feral flowers
The impact of invasive species
18 What escapes the eye
The decline and extinction of bird–flower relationships
19 The restoration of hope
People as conservationists of birds and their flowers
There you have it! I’m incredibly excited that the book is now just about finished (I still have to proof read the typeset text and produce an index) and I look forward to finally having a copy in my hands. Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship is available for pre-order from Pelagic Publishing, or via online bookshops.
But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.
At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.
As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.
Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?
For the past year I’ve been keeping a secret from all but a few trusted confidantes: the subject and title of my next book! My publisher – Pelagic – has now announced it on their website and so it’s time to make it public. “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship” will be the first book that covers bird pollination in its entirety, going beyond just hummingbirds, sunbirds and honeyeaters, to consider the more than 60 other bird families that interact with flowers, and the tens of thousands of plants that rely on them as pollinators. You can read more about it on Pelagic’s website.
The 3D mock-up of the cover shown above features an illustration by my good friend Stephen Valentine, a very talented artist who you may remember produced this painting of waxwings that Karin bought for my birthday a few years ago. I’m extremely pleased with how Pelagic have incorporated this into the design of the cover.
The book will be available by autumn I hope, if my writing schedule goes to plan!
On Sunday Karin and I rode our bicycles down to the local beach at Nordstrand. It was a chilly day, maybe 4C, with a raw coastal wind that made it feel that much colder. Our local bit of shallow ocean – the Kattegat – is normally quite calm but there was a swell bringing in seaweed and the (very) occasional item of rubbish. I collected a golf ball but otherwise the beach was free of plastic. That’s the usual state of affairs here, despite it being a popular tourist destination in the summer. If only beaches elsewhere in the world were as clean.
As we walked Karin and I chatted about some of our plans for the coming year. We’re both working on our next books and relishing the process of swapping chapters to read out loud to the writer. The occasional hardy soul, also enjoying being out in the elements, passed us by and we nodded in acknowledgement. Above us the gulls were wheeling and calling, a constant reminder that they were here before us and will remain when we are gone. Moving from the strand line into the sand dunes we found a convenient bench to sit, drink from our water bottles, scoff some nuts and raisins, and admire the view until the cold wind won the argument and moved us on.
Walking back to the bikes we paused to look at the verdant moss growing on the steep faces of the dunes. Small seedlings had germinated in these planty blankets, a promise of growth and flowers during the year to come. Here and there birds had torn out sections in their constant search for insect larvae. Life goes on even in these cold days.
On our ride back through the neat summerhouses that are settled within the nearby pine woodland, male Great Tits were voicing their claims to territory. Spring is surely just round the corner, we hope.
There’s currently a lot of interest in ChatGPT and over the past week, like many others, I have been playing around with this artificial intelligence (AI) system and testing its knowledge and creative powers. The latter are really very impressive: I asked it to write a couple of limericks about Karin and my professions, and about our move to Denmark, and it produced a decent stab at those.
I also probed its knowledge about topics with which I’m familiar, mainly pollinators and pollination of course, and it produced some good answers. When I highlighted some errors it had made, ChatGPT went back and revised its answers, and politely thanked me in the process. If I were a student I would not rely on it to write accurate essays, but so far so good(ish).
This morning, however, I had a very odd experience. I was trying to track down something attributed to Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and I asked ChatGPT: “What did Erasmus Darwin say about birds visiting flowers?”
This is the answer that came back:
Erasmus Darwin was a naturalist, physician, and poet who wrote about a wide range of topics, including birds and flowers. In his 1794 poem “The Loves of the Plants,” he describes how different species of birds visit flowers in search of nectar:
“Birds of each hue, from the gay parrot’s beak To the goldfinch, painted in tiny streak, Sip nectar from the cups that bloom and bow With every breeze, and nod and dance below.”
Now, the first part of this, about Erasmus’s life, is true. It’s also true that he wrote a poem with that title, though it was published in 1791, not 1794.
But, when I double-checked those attributed lines against the published version of the poem that’s on Project Gutenberg, I discovered that they did not exist. ChatGPT had made them up!
As I said, this AI is pretty creative and will certainly write a poem for you on any topic you care to request. But I didn’t ask it for that, I had made a factual query. And ChatGPT had just invented some poetry and claimed it as fact, unless of course those really are Erasmus’s lines and I’ve missed their source (please correct me if I have).
Now as a scientist and writer I try to be rigorous when quoting and citing sources, and if I hadn’t double-checked this I might have taken it at face value. And one could argue that my initial question – “What did Erasmus Darwin say…?” – was a little ambiguous. But nonetheless, I was not expecting an AI to try to pass off something it had created as fact.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this when using ChatGPT? It’s a fun, creative tool. But as far as I can tell, it also has a very human ability to lie.
Although we are still in the early part of November, it’s never too soon to be thinking about buying Christmas gifts for friends and family. And what better gift than a book? Here’s a few suggestions for some that I’ve read this year that I think will make fine presents.
Who doesn’t love a good story, and Stephen King is a master storyteller. I’ve really enjoyed his more recent novels and Billy Summers stands out for me. It’s part thriller, part romance, and as always there’s a little touch of the uncanny. Very different, but just as much a page turner, is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Although Robinson is known as a science fiction writer, this novel is set in the near future when climate change breakdown is forcing governments and businesses into making radical changes. As much as anything this is a road map for how we can get ourselves out of the current climate crisis.
Talking of which, Michael Mann’s The New Climate War should be read by everyone interested in understanding how big corporations have colluded with the media and governments to trivialise and misrepresent the problems that we currently face. I reviewed this and a book about the insect biodiversity crisis, Silent Earth by Dave Goulson, in this blog post.
If you are looking for a book to help young children understand the importance of bees and other pollinators then I can highly recommend Can We Really Help the Bees? by Katie Daynes and Róisín Hahessy, for which I acted as science advisor.
For the ornithologically minded you might want to consider the lavishly illustrated Hummingbirds: A Celebration of Nature’s Jewels by Glenn Bartley and Andy Swash. Those who love writing and art with an environmental focus would appreciate an annual subscription to Dark Mountain, which gives you two beautifully produced volumes every year. A couple of my essays appeared in earlier volumes and the quality of the contributions never fails to impress me.
For the budding or experienced cook, Niki Webster’s Rebel Recipes serves up some amazing vegan dishes that Karin and I have really enjoyed trying. And speaking of my wife, of course I have to include her Essential Companion to Talking Therapy as the perfect gift for anyone considering or currently undergoing counselling or therapy, or who is thinking about becoming a practitioner.
Finally, if you’re looking for particular book ideas or just like browsing through lists of what others recommend, there’s lots of inspiration over at the independent Shepherd site.
I hope that you’ve found this useful. Feel free to comment with suggestions for other books that you’ve enjoyed.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 