Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding Reviews
Monday, July 26th, 2010 at
3:37 pm
Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
F rom the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds?great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly colored songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a
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(out of 17 reviews)
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Review by David B Richman for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
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As a mostly casual birder- my life list is less than 300 – who still finds watching birds fascinating, I like to occasionally read about the science and sport of birding. Some of Roger Tory Peterson’s non-field guide books come to mind. However these were not so much histories as collections of essays. I know of only one or two other writers who have tackled this subject and Scott Weidensaul has now surpassed them all with “Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding.”
This book is a treat for anyone interested in birds, birding or ornithology. In 314 pages of text and 40 plus more pages of Acknowledgements, Notes and Bibliography, Weidensaul covers the period from pre-Colombian Native American myths and the early work of such naturalists as Mark Catesby and John Bartram to Kenn Kaufman and David Sibley, and the modern field guide. Of course Roger Tory Peterson, Frank Chapman, Cleveland Bent and Ludlow Griscom get their due, as do the many women (who seldom did get credit in publications on the subject), such as Harriet Lawrence Hemenway, Florence Merriam Bailey and Rosalie Edge, among others.
Bird study has come a long way and despite the occasional bore described by Weidensaul, who tallies what the group has found without actually even bothering to look, many birders are genuinely involved in scientific work and/or important conservation efforts.
There is a great thrill in watching birds, or in any other pursuit of natural history (butterfly watching, botanizing, etc.), that many miss in their pursuit of success or (in many cases) of just daily bread. We are lucky in the United States to have both a beautiful land and a high biotic diversity. It is up to us to both conserve and enjoy it. Reading this book would be a good start!
Review by s.5 for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
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Like one of the other reviewers, I also found this book an entertaining and informative read. It’s a book written for a popular audience, so all kinds of readers should find something in this book.
While there are a few facts that Weidensaul could have attended to a bit more closely (Florence Merriam first published her first field guide, Birds Through an Opera Glass, in 1889, not 1899, for instance) … the chapter discussing David Allen Sibley’s guides is outstanding. Weidensaul interviewed Sibley for the book and, as a result, is able to tell the story of how Sibley’s field guides came into being, were designed in the ways that they were, and function as texts.
I’m surprised Weidensaul does not attend more to American women writers such as Neltje Blanchan, Mabel Osgood Wright, and Olive Thorne Miller. These authors all published books about birds in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and to have included them in this story would have, I think, made Weidensaul’s history of birding appear to have been less of a story about “great men.”
With all of that said, Weidensaul’s book is very compelling, personal, and full of facts. He ends making a very strong call for bird preservation in the book, claiming that birders could learn a lot from hunters (among which he counts himself a member). Birders in general have become so concerned with identifying birds that we’ve forgotten to spend as much or more effort preserving birds, Weidensaul claims. Without the birds, Weidensaul reminds us, we’d have nothing to look at and listen to.
Review by Ken Januski for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
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I’ve written less than ten book reviews for Amazon and this is the second in which I include “history” in the title. I can’t really explain this other than that perhaps I’ve gotten more interested in history as I get older.
In any case I’ve chosen it very deliberately to convey my reactions to this great book. As I’ve read it I’ve felt that I’ve started to understand the history, and community, of which I, as a birder/bird-watcher, am part. This is a great gift to readers who are perhaps avid birders but have little sense of the long history of American birdwatching. Though it’s not that difficult today to join a birding trip somewhere or other and thus become part of the birding community, this book helps to convey the rich and varied history that is American birding. It’s somewhat like discovering that though you thought you were the only person who cared about Solitary Vireos, and that this was just due to your idiosyncratic nature, there is actually a club that began 50 years ago devoted strictly to them. You are actually a part of a very large community.
The other particularly salient point I think is the groundedness and passion of the book. As with any subject once you get somewhat knowledgeable and especially if you have some talent with words it’s not that difficult to write a book that seems to cover the subject and yet leaves the reader feeling somewhat dissatisfied. In other words a perhaps entertaining but in the end superficial book. Sometimes that’s just what you want. But there are other times, as with a good hearty home-cooked meal after a month on the road eating fast-food, that you really appreciate something that is a bit more substantial. This book is that meal.
I can’t convey how rewarding it’s been to read this book. As the author goes through the history of American birding you feel that he has really thought about what he is writing. This becomes especially true at the end where he questions the prevalence of counting/listing in contemporary birding and the need for a more holistic approach to it. But it’s not a preachy environmental work. It’s more that of a thoughtful and engaged birder thinking about where American birding and birds have been and where they are heading. Without more concern for birds on the part of birders and others there will be far fewer birds to check off one’s list. But again this isn’t a preachy environmental polemic. It’s more a heartfelt consideration of what it means to be a birder, particularly an American birder.
As I said I can’t recommend it enough.
As an afterthought I have to say that it seems to me that it is a tremendous time to be a birder and to be a birder who reads. The Sibley guides, Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion, The Shorebird Guide, among others, are helping to create a golden age of birding books.
Review by R. Hardy for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
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Birdwatching, now usually called “birding”, is no longer funny. You may remember Miss Jane Hathaway in “The Beverly Hillbillies”, for instance, but the stock character of the bumbling, bespectacled, binocular-wearing birdwatcher no longer fits. Birdwatchers are no longer silly. Miss Hathaway is one example cited by Scott Weidensaul in his delightful _Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding_ (Harcourt). Not only are birders sensible people, they have a sensitive interest in the environment, an attitude that is both fashionable and justified, and also they are too numerous to be considered a eccentric fringe. Depending on the definition (and some definitions include anyone who puts birdseed in the backyard to watch the subsequent feasting), there are something around fifty million birders in America. Even if you can’t define a particular number, there are statistics that show, by rolls of official birding organizations, sales of bird identification books, or participation in bird counts, that birding is booming, possibly the fastest-growing outdoor hobby in the country. Weidensaul has written books about birds before, and he is a federally licensed bird bander, and he loves his subject, an affection he easily conveys to the reader. Everyone, even the city dweller, pays some attention to the ubiquitous feathered creatures, so it is not hard, really, to accept that birding is increasingly popular, and Weidensaul’s history tells how this came to be.
Audubon’s colossal project and resultant elephant folio didn’t do much for birdwatchers, even when the book was reduced in size. Weidensaul provides a history of field guides to birds, winding up with profiles of Roger Tory Peterson, who revolutionized the way the books were organized, and of his successors, David Sibley and Kenn Kaufman. The first popular field guide to birds came out in 1889, from Florence Merriam, a 26-year-old woman who muscled her way into a male-dominated field. She loved nature as much as her brother did, and was the first female member of the American Ornithological Union. She felt that nature study was an antidote to “that most abhorred and abhorrable occupation of plain sewing, with housekeeping and bookkeeping.” Her _Birds through an Opera Glass_ (they didn’t call them binoculars back then) was a relaxed guide on how to identify living birds in the field. This does not sound revolutionary, but it was. We take for granted that birdwatchers are going to be doing their identification of birds they see flitting around, but in the nineteenth century, the way to identify a bird was to shoot it so that all the details of its body could be consulted. The brilliant Elliott Coues railed against the “opera glass fiends” because, as Weidensaul says, he “remained firm in his belief that the path to ornithological wisdom issued from the muzzle of a shotgun.” Coues’s own _Key to North American Birds_ of 1872 was a guide to identifying bird carcasses. Collecting and identifying birds by shooting them did not do the birds any good; as ivory-billed woodpeckers became more rare, for instance, they became more prized for even academic collections, let alone private ones.
The amateur watchers, though, had the moral and (though the word was not in play at the time) ecological high ground over the academics. There was hostility between the groups in the nineteenth century, but Weidensaul shows that the split between them was not really significant. Ornithology, he reports, “remains one of the branches of science most enriched by the work of dedicated amateurs, and it’s hard to find a full-time ornithologist who isn’t also a recreational birder.” The latter characteristic he finds remarkable. “I don’t know many structural engineers who devote their free time to visiting highway overpasses for fun, but there is something about birds that makes even those whose nine-to-five jobs are ornithological pick up their binoculars as soon as the workday is finished.” The split in the birding community is no longer between watchers versus shooters, but between those who value watching the birds for its intellectual, scientific, and conservational aspects versus those who check off birds in formal or informal competition to see who can see the most. Competitive birding was derided as “ornithogolfing” by a museum ornithologist, but again, Weidensaul plays down the split between the two groups, though he is not a competitor. He values the sort of listing that is done in, say, the Christmas Bird Count every year by which “citizen scientists” can provide population data. He worries that most birders, perhaps the competitive birders especially, are not sufficiently devoted to the conservation of the birds they watch or to the conservation of the land that supports the birds. Nonetheless, he sees signs that the attention to how birds live and what they can tell us about changes in the land and sea is increasing and he is hopeful. His brightly written and amusing book calls attention to a hobby that is not only growing in numbers of participants, but is also growing in scientific importance.
Review by Midwest Book Review for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding
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Author Scott Weidensaul has traveled the world tracking and writing about birds and has already written several notable nature books about them, but OF A FEATHER: A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN BIRDING is much more than just another ornithological study of a passionate hobby. It’s a survey of the history of American birding, from early European arrival in North America to its modern popularity among general birdwatchers. From ornithological scientists who early on collected eggs on the frontier to some of the first conservation movements and those who participated them – including a range of unlikely characters – OF A FEATHER is a pick recommended not just for public lending libraries but for any high school to college level collection including ornithological references; especially at the introductory level.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch