A. Rochon-Duvigneaud
Translated part of
‘L’œil des Oiseaux’
in ‘Les Yeux et la vision
des Vertébrés’.
My Mission
In 1998 I went on a “banding trip” with my then co-board members of Stone (= Steenuilen Overleg Nederland = The Little Owl Working Group in the Netherlands) Ronald van Harxen and Pascal Stroeken. Together we founded Stone in the months previously. I joined them as there were many more Little Owls in their region and they were working on a long time monitoring scheme (and they still are).
One of the female owls, sitting in her nest box with her chicks, was photographed to show her “brood patch”. After developing the film the slide not only showed the beautiful brood patch but also, although I didn’t know it at that time, a ”coloboma”, which meant the eye had not developed properly during her growth in the egg. I thought it was a result of either a fight with another animal or a collision with a tree branch or something similar.
To find out about this “anomaly” I contacted Prof J.F.G. Worst, an ophthalmic surgeon who gave a presentation about the avian eye at the annual meeting of the W.N.R., (the Dutch Predatory Bird Working Group) a few years previously, and of whom I knew he was (also) interested in avian eyes.
After this first visit I was able to bring him “birds’ eyes” for research, as my job took me along the highways in Holland a lot and I've got an eye for traffic casualties, especially Barn Owls (Tyto alba). Nearly from the start he asked me if I knew anything about Mr. A. Rochon-Duvigneaud’s book, “Les yeux et la vision des vertébrés”. Of course I
had neither heard of Mr. Rochon-Duvigneaud nor his book.
As he kept insisting, he made me curious and when I found out the book was available in the Library of the University of Groningen, I went there and made two copies with the copying machine. This did not help me a lot, as my French, although passable in buying a loaf of bread or ordering groceries, wasn’t sufficient for reading AND understanding a scientific book of this order, regardless the interesting nature of the contents.
Professor Worst, who had worked, among other places, at the Maritime Laboratories in Roscoff and the “Fondation Ophtalmologique Adolphe de Rothschild” in Paris, was more proficient in the French language and had no problems understanding it. So to be able to fully understand the book of Monsieur Rochon-Duvigneaud, I had to find ways to have the book translated into English.In the course of time, I also understood the importance of the book as, up to nearly 1985, a lot of books (although these were written in the English language) cited the book of Monsieur Rochon-Duvigneaud and used the drawings of his book. Knowing a lot of people, like myself, were not able to read French (properly) I thought it was important to students and scholars in biology to have access to his supreme knowledge.
At the 2007 World Owl Conference in Groningen, Holland, I met James R. Duncan from Canada and he was able to arrange a translation by the translators office of the Dominion of Canada as Canada is a bi-lingual country.
With the help from a lot of friends I was able to have this book, although only the part about birds, translated. The names of the birds, where the Latin names are concerned, have been “updated” (as these have been changed a few times in the past sixty years). Latin names have also been added where they were missing, as to give the international biological society a better reference. And where Prof. Worst and I deemed it necessary, the translation has been altered as to give the contents an update with the things we have discovered in the past 10 years.
Professor Worst and I think this translation can be fundamental and the start of a new era in research of the avian eye and will lead you to even better knowledge of how the avian eye works and functions.
Of course, in the course of time, insights in this field have changed and it will not have the same importance as it had 60 years ago. However it will show a lot of people the real inside of birds’ eyes.
Roden, april 2009