A Bird Book in Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush

With an estimated forty-seven million people planning trips to see birds each year, birdwatching (or birding) is one of America's most popular hobbies. Birding as we know it today largely evolved during the twentieth century as developments in optics allowed birders to view and photograph birds going about their business in their native habitats, and as advancements in the publishing world allowed for the creation of field guides that were easy to carry around.

If we think further back into the history of ornithology, it's usually the famous illustrations of John James Audubon that come to mind. The most interesting thing to me about Audubon's work is that it seems to straddle the realms of art and science. I decided to take a look through Watson Library's collections to see what other beautiful works might be walking the tightrope between those fields.

The selections below all come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period in which an Enlightenment sensibility fostered renewed interest in the natural world, a second wave of colonial expansion provided opportunity for the discovery of new species, and advancements in the scientific method formalized a system of classification.

The illustrations of François Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), collected and reproduced in this volume with commentary by Antoine Reille, are beautiful examples of ornithological illustrations of the late eighteenth century.

Consider the practical challenges of creating detailed illustrations of birds in this period. Martinet may have had the opportunity to study species native to France in their natural habitats, but naturalists did not yet have binoculars or spotting scopes to aid them in their studies, so he would have had to depend on fleeting impressions from whatever distance his subject would tolerate. This would hardly allow him to capture the level of detail and accuracy necessary for a scientific illustration.

Travelers were bringing birds into Europe from around the world both alive and as stuffed specimens. Many of the live birds were kept in cages and aviaries at the Jardin des Plantes and Martinet preferred to work from these when he was lucky enough to have a live model. When no live subjects of a particular species were available, Martinet had to make do with dead specimens that had been preserved with varnish or dried in an oven, most of which he had never seen alive.

This illustration of a pied kingfisher, a bird native to parts of Africa and Asia, is a perfect example of the quirky style that emerges when an artist has never seen a live subject. It is shown here next to a photograph of a live kingfisher that I took in Cambodia earlier this year. Note the live bird's posture and jaunty crest.

The exquisite detail of the feathers in the wing of the barn owl above shows that Martinet must have had a captive or stuffed specimen to work from, although this is a common species in France, as he notes in writing on the branch. The shape of the facial disc and the color of the eyes are not true to life but give the owl an incredibly charming expression.

Undoubtedly the highlight of Watson Library's ornithological holdings are four volumes by René Primevère Lesson (1794–1849) that describe and illustrate hummingbirds and birds-of-paradise that Lesson saw and collected on a round-the-world voyage aboard La Coquille from 1822 to 1825.

Lesson published this series of books after returning to Europe, and it's clear from his breathtaking illustrations that he was able to spend time during his voyage observing these birds in the wild. We can forgive Lesson if the hummingbird wings look a little awkward at times, considering how quickly they buzz around! Hummingbirds are native only to the Americas, so these birds would have been quite striking to a European audience in Lesson's time.

Birds-of-paradise had been a source of intrigue for Europeans since the sixteenth century when stuffed male birds showed up through trade with their legs removed, provoking myths that they were magical creatures.

Lesson was one of the first to document birds-of-paradise in detail and describe the birds using a scientific approach.

By the end of the nineteenth century, multitudes of new species had been collected and needed to be described in a systematic way. Robert Ridgway, curator of the Division of Birds at the United States National Museum (later the Smithsonian), believed that a standardized vocabulary for colors was needed, and he produced A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists in 1886, illustrating 186 colors in ten hand-painted plates.

Not satisfied with the scope of this initial publication, Ridgway soon began working to expand the project, and in 1912 he published Color Standards and Color Nomenclature. This edition included fifty-three colored plates with 1,115 named colors and became a standard reference for ornithologists. This book solved a few mysteries for me about bird names: plumbeous vireo and verditer flycatcher, to name a few!

The birds in many nineteenth-century ornithology books have an awkwardness that comes from using stuffed specimens as models instead of live birds. My favorite thing about Bunrei's Book of a Hundred Birds is that it's clear that the artist spent a lot of time watching birds in their natural environments.

The illustrations in this book depict birds absorbed in their daily activities: a kingfisher capturing a fish in mid-air, a heron preening its wing, a lapwing rocketing out of a marsh. While this book may not have been specifically produced with a scientific aim, the birds are drawn with such detailed accuracy that it could serve as a scientific record.

This little gem was singled out for acquisition because of the cloth binding and while the binding is indeed beautiful, it's the author's eccentric descriptions of local birds that made it my favorite book in this post. It contains a year's worth of observations of the birds in Central Park, with a chapter dedicated to each month. The tone of the Parkhurst's prelude exemplifies the shifting approach to ornithological study. He rails against scientists shutting themselves away in natural history museums to study dead specimens and pushes for more field observation of live birds in their natural habitats.

Many of my fellow birders will sympathize with the following advice, as applicable today as it was in 1894, in which the author urges new birders to overcome the sheepishness that may come along with prowling city parks with a pair of binoculars, staring at the ground or into the trees:

A good opera-glass is an indispensable companion in one's researches, and it is not amiss to suggest that he cannot too quickly conquer his diffidence in using the glass freely, even though it attract the curious attention of people about him. I have lost many a good view of a bird I wanted to see, through dislike of the gaping looks of an idle passer-by.

Like many birders, Parkhurst exhibits favoritism toward certain species and antipathy toward others. I can’t pretend to understand his dislike of the Brown Creeper (one of my favorite winter sights) but I love Parkhurst's account of it:

An inoffensive but wearisome little fellow is a brown-clad denizen of all our woods in winter . . . On first acquaintance it makes no particular impression other than that of being a neatly clad and busy little body; but in course of time it becomes really irritating to the feelings, from its exasperatingly conscientious but cold-blooded diligence, which makes you feel as if you should admire it on moral grounds; but you cannot.

Parkhurst goes on about how unbearable Brown Creepers are for a full two pages before finally concluding with this incredible burn:

If in the transmigration of souls Sisyphus was ever incarnated in bird-form, we certainly have him here, neatly encased in feathers, for it is nothing but climb, climb, climb, and never getting there.

These are just a few selections from many beautiful books on birds available in Watson Library.