Gallery

Tom Dunlap on Early Bird Guides

THESE PAGES, FROM early field guides to the birds, suggest something about the tangled ways science, technology, and the market shaped nature knowledge in America's industrial, urban society. When these authors began helping people identify birds without shooting them, no one knew just what information birdwatchers needed or how to present it, were not even sure all species could be identified without shooting them, and saw birdwatching as an introduction to science, a way to nature's wonders, or a genteel recreation. Their books treated a hundred or so familiar species, the birds of a small region, those in the east or west half of the country, or everything in North America north of Mexico. They mixed science and sentiment, described birds in technical detail and telegraphic phrases or Romantic prose in full sentences—sometimes did both on the same page—printed different kinds of pictures by various processes in color or black and white, used the artistic conventions of natural history illustration or fine art, and linked pictures to text (or failed to) in ways shaped by the author's experience or demanded by the printer's bill. In 1934 Roger Tory Peterson's work swept the competition, but the people who snapped up his Field Guide to the Birds and made it an instant success had learned their birds with the aid of these guides and others like them.1	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Collection, LC-U9-20246. Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin introduces Woodsy Owl, whose motto, "Give a hoot! Don't pollute," influenced millions of schoolchildren at the height of the environmental movement. Popular culture has long been a source of powerful ideas about nature and environmental ethics, and historians may find rich sources in media campaigns aimed particularly at children. USDA Mascot Woodsy Owl, September 1971.
Florence Merriam's Birds through an Opera-Glass (1889) used narrative prose, the familiar frame of home life, and the decorative illustrations of popular natural history to introduce a largely female audience to birds around the home. "Mr. Robin," as she had named him on the previous page, was a "domestic bird" whose every action "bespeaks the self-respecting American citizen." She put birds and birdwatching into women's sphere but, by calling for observation and careful records, offered women a way into the public, masculine sphere of science—a path she and her mentor Mabel Osgood Wright (see below) followed to became the first female members of the American Ornithological Union. The picture is a wood engraving, produced by tracing a picture onto the end grain of a block of dense wood (using the plank side produced a woodcut), carving away the surface to produce a raised image, and putting the block in the press form. Wood engravings were easy to make, inexpensive (because text and illustration could be printed together) and showed details well, which made the process a favorite of popular natural history books from the early nineteenth century and of newspapers from the Civil War to the 1880s, when photo reproduction processes became available. This vignette only broke up a block of text, but wood engravings could be used for identification (see the example from Hoffman—page 117).	2
. . . There are about 1611 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.