Western Grebe aka. Dabchick aka. Swan Grebe aka. Swan-necked Grebe
Lake Merritt, Oakland, California, USA
December 2018
Member of the Grebe Family
★Largest North American Grebe★
§A Waterdance of Grebes§ (and you should really check out that waterdance. These are technically different Grebes (Clark's), but these guys do the same thing, and were once thought to be the same species actually)
Chain-smoker
The type who wants to reach the peak of his hobby or interest. Driven
Zine contributor
You know, there weren't that many fun facts about this guy, aside from that water dancing (which, again, you should really take a look at), so that means there's time for a Naturalist Profile!
Sir William Lawrence
(1783 - 1867)
A busy and complicated guy, William Lawrence was a surgeon and author. He helped found The Lancet, a really important medical journal, and wrote a bunch of medical textbooks. He might have even been coined the term Biology. He's more famous, however, for his pre-Darwinian takes on evolution and human development. His wikipedia page is long and dense, but the long and short of it is he was right about a lot of things that few people were right about at the time, wrong about a lot of things, and also was declared blasphemous by the English court at the time. It is said that the level of caution with which Darwin published his early work could be attributed to what happened to Lawrence. He bounced back from this ignominy eventually and was made a Baron by the queen shortly before his death.
What does any of this have to do with birds? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There is no mention of this Grebe, or indeed of birds, birding, or even naturalism in his wikipedia page. It almost makes me wonder if I have the wrong 'Sir William Lawrence', but multiple sources describe him as the original describer of this bird, despite it being a bird of the American West, and him being a British Surgeon. A mistake? Who knows! If it were, this would certainly be the first time this blog has been wrong about anything, that's for sure.
