Background
Dovaston was born in Twyford, West Felton, Shropshire in an estate called "The Nursery" that was started by his father John Dovaston (1740–1808).
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Dovaston was born in Twyford, West Felton, Shropshire in an estate called "The Nursery" that was started by his father John Dovaston (1740–1808).
Dovaston junior studied at Oswestry Grammar School and Shrewsbury School before going to Oxford to study law.
Dovaston Senior became interested in botany after a trip to the West Indies and began to work with plants and planting. At Christ Church, Oxford, he was nicknamed "Crazy Jack of Christ Church". After receiving a Master of Arts degree, he was admitted to the bar in 1807.
He however did not like the practice and when his father died the next year, he moved back to his estate.
Dovaston wrote letters to gentlemans magazines, sometimes under the pen name of "Von Osdat" (an anagram of his surname) and his writings even to more learned journals such as the Magazine of Natural History included light-hearted verse. In his letters to Bewick, he introduced many of his innovations, including what he called an "ornithotrophe" (punning with "trough" and the Greek word for trophy), a hanging bird feeder.
He also experimented with artificial nest boxes. In an 1825 letter to Bewick, he described the observations he made using a small spy-glass that he called an "ornithoscope".
John Denson, the editor of the Magazine of Natural History, had also been using a spy-glass since 1823, although the use of these devices for observing birds grew only after a letter in 1830 by an observer who abhorred killing birds.
Dovaston also experimented with growing mistletoes on trees, fencing off grasslands to study hares, and trying to document bird calls with musical notation. He made a neck ring using cello wire to ring swallows, and noted that four of the birds returned the next year. He found that individual birds had their own specific beats or haunts and rarely intruded into the territories of others
He was among the first to attempt to map and demarcate the boundaries of robin territories.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)