Page 25 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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Yellow-breasted Crake
(Porzana flaviventer)
A tiny “yelloe” crake with remarkably
large feet . . . some black mottling and
white streaks on back and wings.
Flight short and weak, much like that
of a fledgling sparrow, can seldom be
flushed a second time.
he result of his years spent searching for birds began
to appear in publications for fellow ornithologists and,
in 1947, as the book Birds of the West Indies: A Guide to
the Species of Birds That Inhabit the Greater Antilles,
Lesser Antilles, and the Bahama Islands. Published in
England by Collins and in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin,
with descriptions of more than 400 species and subspe-
cies, the book evolved through numerous editions, with
the sixth completed just before Bond’s death.
As Bond traveled among his many far-flung islands
he began to observe a demarcation of species between
the West Indies and the islands farther south, at about
the northern reaches of South America, and he began
to realize that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, the birds
of his islands were much more closely related to those
of North America than South America. Documenting
these “zoogeographical” observations, he proposed a
line between the Lesser Antilles on the north and
Tobago on the south that distinctly separated the more
tropical, southern birds from those of his own area of
study, virtually all of which could be found in the South-
ern United States. Years later, with the broad, but reluctant,
acceptance of this theory, this latitude was christened
“Bond’s Line.”
Meanwhile, in Jamaica, in 1952, a former spymaster
for British Naval Intelligence was starting down a new
career path as a writer of highly romanticized espionage
novels featuring an urbane, extraordinarily handsome,
and violent secret agent. The writer, Ian Fleming, spent
much of his time at his estate in Jamaica, where he was
also a keen observer of the local avifauna. As Casino
Royale began to gather pages, Fleming needed a name
for his spy. He glanced down and noted his valued guide
that cataloged the island’s birds.
“I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding
name I could find,” Fleming later said. “’James Bond’
was much better than something more interesting, like
‘Peregrine Carruthers.’”
James and Mary Bond became aware of Fleming’s “theft”
only after seeing a review of Bond’s bird guide in the
London Times , which included odd references to
sadomasochism, Smith and Wesson guns, and
other terms denoting violence. Finally, in 1961,
a friend sent them a copy of Dr. No , the sixth
of Fleming’s 007 books, and the connection
began to make sense. Mary, a novelist
herself, wrote a lighthearted letter to Fleming, ending,
“I tell my JB he could sue you for defamation of charac-
ter, but he regards the whole thing as a joke.”
Fleming replied in his own affectionate letter that he had
indeed taken the name of the author of “one of my bibles.”
“In return,” he wrote, “I can only offer your James Bond
unlimited use of the name of Ian Fleming for any purpose
he may think fit. Perhaps one day he will discover some
particularly horrible species of bird he would like to
christen in an insulting fashion. That might be a way of
getting his own back!”
The Bonds next visited Jamaica in 1964, when Fleming
invited them for an extended lunch and was entertained by
Mary’s accounts of her husband’s own dangerous exploits.
A heart attack took the novelist’s life later that year.
The real James Bond inherited little of his family’s for-
tune, which his father had severely reduced through his
short lifetime of imprudent behavior.
Bond was purely an amateur, who received no salary
during his lifetime association with the Philadelphia
Academy. He was one of “what might be called gentlemen
naturalists, men who had a burning interest in their fields
but no special training for their work,” wrote biographer
David Contosta. “Jim fitted this description perfectly except
that he lacked the large inheritance or generous allowance
which permitted many other gentlemen of science to live
in some comfort. Far from living in comfort, Jim often
looked downright shabby, his suits old and frayed, accord-
ing to a colleague who met him in the mid-1930s and once,
in downtown Philadelphia, “mistook him for a vagrant.”
Still, after less than two years as a St. Paul’s student,
he contributed modestly to the Annual Fund from 1921
until 1976, when Mary wrote to Rector William Oates
that her husband’s serious illness would prevent his
attending the January alumni meeting in Philadelphia.
Nevertheless, Bond continued to contribute to the work
of the Academy, writing at home in his final years. “James
Bond, internationally regarded as the doyen of Caribbean
ornithology,” began his obituary in The Auk, “died on 14
February 1989, after battling cancer for many years.”
Birds of the West Indies continues to be the definitive
work on the science to which he gave his life.
T