Swifts in a Tower

"There are many reasons. David Lack’s book is a love story, really, and it’s an indication of what you can do by simple observation and dedication. When Lack did his fantastic study of the swifts he had no gadgets. There’s a chapter written by his son which describes what has been learned about swifts since 1956: it’s gratifyingly short. Yes, there has been lots of work with things like geolocators. We now know in a fair amount of detail the routes the swifts take and the speeds they travel during their migration to and from Africa. No doubt David Lack would have been fascinated by those things. I certainly am. But most of what we know now we knew in 1956, as a result of Lack climbing repeatedly up and down the steps of the tower in the University Museum, peering into the nest boxes, gazing into the sky, scouring ancient texts, reading poems, and corresponding with amateur and professional naturalists across the world. The book shows that proper scientists (by which I mean people who are interested in the truth about nature), acknowledge no boundary between that which is traditionally and arbitrarily designated as science, and everything else. David Lack wanted to understand swifts. A typical modern scientist’s way of doing that would be to collect data, reduce them to figures, and then squeeze the figures into a box made out of materialist, reductionist presumptions. But the real world is always far too big, complex, and exciting to fit. The box never, ever holds the whole truth. “If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and the humility to be a scientist” Modern scientists forget that science is just a method , not a religion. They’re fundamentalists—just as irrational, faithful, and zealous as the Creationists they rightly despise. Lack had the humility to know that a lumpen, Earth-bound creature like him could only hope to understand anything about these astonishing birds if he suspended all his cherished presumptions and recruited everybody and everything in the effort. The book reads like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century naturalist’s potpourri. The poetry rubs shoulders with the figures which detail the clutch size, or whatever. He airs speculation, he retells anecdotes. If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and (yes, here’s that word again), the humility, which are the main qualifications for being a scientist. That sounds like real hero worship, doesn’t it? There are less benevolent heroes than David Lack. Yes. There’s a lifetime of wonder distilled here. The wonder began when Lack was a boy, and it never left him. Indeed, it crescendoed rather than diminished as he found out more about these birds. It’s often the other way round with boring, nerdish scientists. He wondered; he reflected. He didn’t just collect his facts and stick them in the boxes we call ‘articles’ in academic journals. They were obviously turning around in his mind all the time as he ate and slept. He lived and breathed these birds all his life, and the book shows what can happen if rigour and passion ride together. It is certainly a scientific book, but it’s a scientific book in the true sense: a book that seeks to understand—not merely to describe using the conventional scientific adjectives."