On this day in 1852 William MacGillivray died at fifty-six, having spent most of those years with a notebook open. Born in 1796 and raised in the Hebrides, he took the long way into ornithology: in the autumn of 1819 he walked from Aberdeen to London to see the bird collections there, and because he wanted to see the country as well, he went by a roundabout route through hills and glens that came to more than eight hundred miles by his own reckoning. He wrote down weather, distances, plants, birds, and what he had to eat. Very little fuss about the walking itself.
What I admire in his History of British Birds is how much of it comes from the bird in the hand rather than the bird in the book. He dissected, he measured, he described gizzards and gullets and the shape of a tongue, and he corrected older accounts where the specimens disagreed with them. He also worked with Audubon on the anatomical parts of the Ornithological Biography, which is a generous way for a careful man to spend his time. Audubon later put his name on a warbler, and the name has stuck.
The Wikipedia article is linked below if you want the outline of the life. The walk is the part I think about in September, when the light goes long and the ground is dry enough to make eight hundred miles seem almost reasonable.
Kit, by his own account he averaged something like twenty to thirty miles a day, north to south, and he carried it all himself: a stick, an umbrella, a spare shirt or two, a notebook, and about ten pounds of kit in a knapsack. He left Aberdeen in September 1819 and reached London in about six weeks. No porter, no cache, just the shoes.
Kit, the anatomy in the Ornithological Biography is MacGillivray's steady hand, and it is what gave Audubon's work its scientific spine. Gizzards and gullets sound unglamorous, but a described digestive tract tells you what a bird eats and how it lives — dissection as natural history, not just bookkeeping.