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

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.

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 issue, when he contributed a list of birds he’d collected during a brief visit there the previous year. The list included a species previously unknown to western science, which was named in his honour as Tristram’s grackle (now more commonly known as Tristram’s starling).

Tristram made a major contribution to the study of birds. At that time ornithology reflected imperial priorities and was concerned with collecting, describing and mapping. His observations of Palestine’s birds, in particular, laid the groundwork for the modern ornithology of the area.

However, his exploits in Palestine, still honoured in the name “Tristram’s starling”, also show why honorific bird names like this have come under increasing scrutiny.

Tristram returned to Palestine for a fuller investigation in 1864. He travelled south from Beirut with a group of fellow naturalists and a large baggage train. The account of his ten-month-long journey was published in 1865 as The Land of Israel.

This book, and the several others he wrote about Palestine, formed part of a growing wave of popular tourist accounts of the Holy Land. They fed the interest and shaped the perceptions of British readers fascinated by the area’s historical and Biblical remnants, its living inhabitants, and the missionary efforts to achieve conversions to Christianity.

Unusually, Tristram and his companions travelled far off the well-beaten tourist and Christian pilgrimage routes throughout Palestine. The Land of Israel includes detailed descriptions of Palestine’s diverse ethnic groups, their domestic, religious, military and economic traditions and practices, and their relationships with one another.