All the right curves: in an island hummingbird, the shape of the female's bill enables her to feast on local flora inaccessible to the male

The differences between the bills of male and female purple-throats make it hard not to draw parallels to another group of birds with amazingly variable beaks, Darwin's finches. Just as bills of Darwin's finches vary from island to island within the Galapagos, so, too, do bills of male and female purple-throats vary from island to island in the Lesser Antilles. The question is, Do inter-island differences in the bills of males and females correspond to inter-island differences in plants and flowers? If so, the purple-throated carib may be the sexual equivalent of Darwin's finches. My next step is to travel, as Darwin did, from one island to the next, documenting such variation. I've already booked my next visit.

Ethan J. Temeles ("All the Right Curves," page 52) traces his lifelong fascination with predatory birds to his infancy, when his parents hung a print of a gyrfalcon above his crib. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on sexual dimorphism in birds of prey and went on to study dimorphism in other animals, including hummingbirds. He is now a professor of biology at Amherst College in Massachusetts. When Temeles isn't teaching ecology and evolution in the classroom, he travels with students to the Lesser Antilles to continue his fieldwork, funded by the National Science Foundation, on purple-throated caribs. That long-term research, he says, is among the most stimulating work of his career, but his greatest thrill comes from watching his students get hooked on biology. "Fitting the Bill?" an article by Temeles and Paul W. Ewald, appeared in the May 1999 issue of Natural History.

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