Greetings Ian and Tweets --

On 12 May 2004, Ian Paulsen wrote:

> Instead I
> was thinking about doing a History of the Field Guide. I have been
> wondering how much the avaerage birder understand this topic. I know
> everyone is going to Peterson did the first field guide, end of story.
> But I've got a feeling there's more to it than that.

RT Peterson's first field guide was certainly a watershed event in
bird guidebook publishing, but was equally a refection on Peterson's
abilities as well as the new technology of the times -- inexpensive,
good-quality binoculars. (Binoculars were commonly available as early
as the turn of the last century, even in the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
Field glasses had become commonly available much earlier in the 19th
Century.)

Before Peterson, one of the most used bird guide books was Elliot
Coues' "Key to North American Birds," first published in 1882. My
copy is the 4th edition published in 1896. In Coues' time, "The
Double-barreled Shot Gun is your main reliance," as he writes at the
onset of his chapter on Field Ornithology. Today our main reliance is
the prismatic binocular.

I still use Coues, though rarely. He provides good physical
descriptions of the birds and clear, still-useful pictures (mostly
heads and bills). Because the late 19th century was a time of
trinomials and the ascendancy of "splitters," Coues' can also be
useful in sorting out contemporary races of some species -- tempered,
of course, with the knowledge based on more observers in the field,
and laboratory analyses.

In Coues' times, the collection of museum specimens was still
important, including eggs (oology). So a history of bird
identification books is inextricably linked with the technology of
the times, as well as the needs of science. Now, we do a lot of
behavioral studies. I understand it's a bit difficult to study the
behavior of a museum skin.

The study of dead marine birds washed up on beaches has produced its
own small collection of "beached birds" field guides in recent
decades.

Doug Canning


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Douglas Canning
Olympia, Washington, USA
dcanning at nisquallyestuary.org
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