Bird Books of My Youth

26 February 2013 - OK, I really didn't expect to reach this point. I figured that I would mess up the process of creating my blog. I may yet.

BIRD BOOKS OF MY YOUTH - When I began birding, or birdwatching as it was then called, there was a paucity of bird books for a youngster living in British Columbia. Today's beginner can be overwhelmed by the published resources available to him or her, but when I was a kid the best one could do was to own a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds. The first edition published in 1941 contained 5 colour and 30+ black and white plates. The second edition (1961) was vastly improved with almost all plates in colour. It was this edition that I bought in 1962 when I was twelve.

Prior to ...Western Birds I had limped along with Birds of America, a large many times reprinted door stop of a book with colour plates by the wonderful Louis Agassiz Fuerters. This book was an inexpensive version of one of the turn of the century state bird books, The Birds of New York. The plates had be reproduced so many times between 1917 and the early 1960s that they were murky and oddly hued. Black and white sketches by Rex Brasher and photographs by early pioneers of bird photography like Herbert K. Job broke up the text. The text was readable but very dated with dire predictions like the expected extinction of the Pileated Woodpecker.

The second edition of Field Guide to Western Birds gave me a great boost, though I was still pretty green. I remember flipping through my copy and wondering aloud what the differences between "non-breeding" and "breeding" meant. To my mother's amusement, my older brother suggested that the non-breeders were just chicken.