A Bird Calendar for Northern India

📘 Dewar (1875-1957) was a barrister, British civil servant in India, and ornithologist who wrote several books about Indian birds. He made frequent contributions to newspapers and periodicals such as The Madras Mail, Pioneer, the Times of India, the Civil & Military Gazette and Bird Notes, and later in life he wrote critiques on the theory of evolution. He studied natural science at Jesus College, Cambridge, before joining the Indian civil service in 1898. He married Edith Rawles in Bombay in 1902, and was posted Accountant General in Punjab from 1921-24. Dewar favoured the study of birds in their natural environment as opposed to museum specimens and accused the museum ornithologists of needlessly multiplying new species and altering names. Having been taught the principles of evolution, he half-heartedly accepted them and in his early ornithological works appears to accept ideas of adaptation and selection. However, he later became a creationist and published a number of books and debates attacking evolution, and was the founding secretary-treasurer of the Evolution Protest Movement in 1932. In his book The Transformist Illusion, published posthumously in 1957, he attempted to show the failure of evolution but reviewers pointed out the problems with his objections. A Bird Calendar of Northern India was first published in 1916, compiled from sketches which had previously appeared in The Pioneer. Popular descriptions of the majority of the birds included had been given in Dewar's earlier work Indian Birds (1910).