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When I started grad school, and people asked what I did, I said I was a field ornithologist. Then in my PhD (which was still very heavily focused on birds), I dubbed myself more of a population ecologist. Now that I’m searching for a job, I’ll call myself whatever the advert wants me to call myself.
But this is part of a trend towards the shame of calling oneself an ornithologist, a mammalogist, an entomologist, or a marine botanist. We’re afraid to let the organisms we study define us in large part because of the shift away from organismal biology to conceptual biology. There are far more job adverts for population ecologists than ornithologists.
Some universities have taken this to the extreme – Queen’s University, for example, offers no taxon-specific courses. And there’s something to be said for the study of environmental physiology, or behavioural ecology, or adaptive morphology since it can often result in a broad education.
But there’s also something to be said for the study of birds, mammals, insects, and algae, and their unique characters. For those of us in the field, many of our research questions are, in reality, driven by the field techniques we know. If you want to catch 50 adult puffins, I’m your man. Give me 3 days, and you’ll get your sample. But ask me to catch 10 voles, or 25 wasps, or 18 trout, and I’m as useless as coals to Newcastle.
That’s not to say that I’m not interested in various broad concepts. I’m fascinated by mate choice, foraging ecology, nutritional ecology, migration, demography, and life history theory – I just apply these to the system I know best: birds.
The folks over at Arthropod Ecology gave a pretty optimistic run-down of how to land a tenure-track job in entomology, which sparked a lively back-and-forth on Twitter with them, and Terry from Small Pond Science as it relates to academic labels, and hiring.
Regardless of what I call myself (population ecologist, foraging ecologist, demographer), I likely won’t get an interview at a department that has one other person who uses birds as their model species. It doesn’t matter if they study Neotropical migrants and forestry practices, and I’m all about seabirds as central-place foragers – in the eyes of the search committee, we’re both “bird people”.
True, a department wouldn’t hire two behavioural ecologists, but they’re also not likely to advertise for a 2nd behavioural ecologist.
How many faculty could supervise students equally well if they are working on ants, seaweed, elk, and chickadees? Probably not many. How many faculty have published on such a variety of focal species? Probably fewer. We all have our favourite system / taxonomic group in which we know how to work.
Hiring committees need to see beyond the means by which we accomplish the ends of our research. If a department wants a population ecologist, it shouldn’t matter if I study populations of African wildebeests, rockhopper penguins, Atlantic salmon, parasitoid wasps, leaf-cutter ants, or crayfish. But in some cases, it probably does come into play, for better or for worse.
The Lab and Field 
Yeah. I’ve got a PhD in history… but there are an enormous number of very common fields and subfields… of course! I have the basics of the discipline down—the methods, ideas, questions—but there’s a huge range, and I am completely, utterly ignorant about the vast, vast, vast majority of historical scholarship.
Because work in the humanities tends to be singular endeavouring, I don’t know how important it was for my committee members to know anything about my subject. (They didn’t know much but as a whole were well versed in US/international affairs in the decades around my very specific topic.) I did get some advice but most of the time it was up to be to figure it all out, and that was just fine.
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I come at this from a librarianship perspective, having a Masters in Library and Information Science, and a limited science perspective, having a B.Sc. in biology. I can see two trends happening in librarianship that may be applicable to other fields as well.
The first trend is the simple fact that there are fewer jobs available per institution, be it public, academic, government, or other specialty libraries. What this implies is that it is impossible to become as specialized in one’s day-to-day work, since there are fewer people available to actually fulfill all the functions that need to occur to make a library run. So, in the old days (80s and before), there used to be enough permanent employees that someone could specialize and really good in searching a particular database, or another librarian would have the time to learn a particular language to help researchers find information in that language. At my library, Russian, German, and the Scandinavian languages are particularly important, but I have no time to learn them on the job. Of course, one would also have cataloguing librarians and collection management librarians, just to name a few, who would be given the space and time to become incredibly knowledgeable in their area. This could only improve our ability to run our libraries and make for better collections and better interactions with clients. But now, with fewer staff, at my library I have to be a jack-of-all-trades. I have neither the opportunity to specialize nor the intellectual space to develop my field further. Research and publishing is completely out of the question.
The second trend is a general one of distrust in the methods and constructs of previous generations. I feel that this is something general in society, which has been exacerbated in the Internet age, where we feel the need for new concepts and technologies to be used not alongside older ways, but only in place of them. This, of course, flies in the face of reality, in that technologies (and often concepts) are complimentary, not contradictory, but it seems that people now abandon “the old” with glee. For libraries, that means that most librarians are content on solely using online approaches to find information (and ignoring the fact that many online databases are useless for pre-1996 information – the infamous “digital razor” year), where in fact I know I can be a lot more successful and holistic in my search with a print bibliography. It also comes up in the naming within my field. It is now passé to say that one is a “reference librarian” or even a “librarian”. It is becoming a hopeless title. Now people want to be known as “information managers” or something similar. The names of library schools are changing to “iSchools” to be hip and Apple-like. U of Toronto and UBC are notable examples. These schools now ask us to think very theoretically about information, which is fine, but decline to actually teach HOW to do anything practical. I find this parallel with biological field research striking.
So, it may be also be true that in biology, the natural history approach is falling into disdain for similar reasons: we do not have enough people with the freedom to approach the subject from a multitude of angles, and we feel pressure to exhibit ourselves to the outside world in the way that makes us the most relevant, no matter how poorly it actually reflects upon the science (biological or librarian). For biology, I believe we still need people who want to learn and publish about particular groups of organisms, to find out all we can know about them, and to take this natural history angle, if nothing more than to improve our base knowledge so those who would take the theoretical angle of being a non-organism-specific behavioural ecologist can further develop their theories of how the natural world functions overall. Both are necessary for a healthy science.
In a similar vein, I wonder how much of it has to do with the proliferation of stuff (and knowledge). In the 1950s, there might have been one geneticist (maybe), and no self-respecting department would be caught short without at least one botanist, one ornithologist, one ichthyologist, etc. Now, the hires are in environmental physiology, behavioural ecology, and molecular evolution.
I guess it’s sort of like a science librarian being replaced with a digital collections librarian, or the proliferation of digital / digitization librarians instead of reference librarians – focusing more on processes.
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