How a colonial trip to Palestine spurred modern ornithology – and left it with imperial baggage

By Jasmine Donahaye, Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing, Swansea University

Palestine’s natural splendour offered a landscape ripe for scientific “discovery”, description and expropriation by European imperial powers in the 19th century. And in the 1860s an English vicar named Henry Baker Tristram claimed its birds.

Tristram was a co-founder of Ibis, the ornithology journal published since 1859 by the British Ornithologists’ Union. His articles on Palestinian ornithology began with the first…

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