{"id":9687,"date":"2008-01-15T16:16:32","date_gmt":"2008-01-15T21:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/?p=9687"},"modified":"2015-06-08T16:04:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T20:04:57","slug":"of-a-feather-by-scott-weidensaul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/of-a-feather-by-scott-weidensaul\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Of a Feather, by Scott Weidensaul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Birding has certainly come of age, and with these two excellent histories it has become possible for those of us who are addicted to this sport (pastime? obsession?) to examine where we have been and where we are going.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-group sidebar-alignright sidebar-space order-bottom\"><!-- wp:image {\"lightbox\":{\"enabled\":false},\"id\":66178,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"custom\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dl.allaboutbirds.org\/nesting-gull-poster\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" src=\"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/ba-gull-course-cta-tout.jpg\" alt=\"Download this Gull's nest poster\" class=\"wp-image-66178\"\/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Artwork by 2024 Bartels Illustrator Lauren Richelieu.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<!-- \/wp:image --><\/div>\n<div class=\"wp-block-group sidebar-alignright sidebar-space order-bottom\"><!--HubSpot Call-to-Action Code -->\r\n<span class=\"hs-cta-wrapper\" id=\"hs-cta-wrapper-096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da\">\r\n    <span class=\"hs-cta-node hs-cta-096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da\" id=\"hs-cta-096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da\">\r\n        <!--[if lte IE 8]><div id=\"hs-cta-ie-element\"><\/div><![endif]-->\r\n        <a href=\"http:\/\/cta-redirect.hubspot.com\/cta\/redirect\/95627\/096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da\" ><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"hs-cta-img\" id=\"hs-cta-img-096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da\" style=\"border-width:0px;\" src=\"https:\/\/no-cache.hubspot.com\/cta\/default\/95627\/096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da.png\"  alt=\"subscribe to Living Bird magazine\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\r\n    <\/span>\r\n    <script charset=\"utf-8\" src=\"https:\/\/js.hscta.net\/cta\/current.js\"><\/script>\r\n    <script type=\"text\/javascript\">\r\n        hbspt.cta.load(95627, '096b8ce3-0e2d-46c5-bbf7-12de3323c8da', {});\r\n    <\/script>\r\n<\/span>\r\n<!-- end HubSpot Call-to-Action Code -->\r\n\r\n<\/div>\n<p>These books are complementary rather than competitive, and each adds its virtues to the other. Weidensaul, the more experienced and \u201cscientific\u201d birder, gives us history and structure. Rosen, a relative newcomer, also roots his book in history, but enthusiastically chases down digressions literary, philosophical, and geographical. Weidensaul provides just enough personal anecdote to leaven his history, Rosen enough history to anchor his diversions.<\/p>\n<p>If you are going to read both\u2014as I think any birder interested in birding\u2019s roots and branches should\u2014I recommend starting with Weidensaul. He erects a sturdy structure on which the information, anecdote, and ornament of both books can stand. After a quick field trip on the coast of Maine he wings past the Native Americans and starts with early colonists\u2019 reports. He rediscovers one of the early observers, John Lawson, who described many species in his 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina. Later protobirders are better known and get more space\u2014Mark Catesby, William Bartram, and, of course, John James Audubon. Of Bartram he perceptively writes: \u201cFor the first time, we encounter not an immigrant, but an American naturalist on his home turf, a man exulting in the wilderness he explores.\u201d We sometimes forget its splendor today, even as we routinely lament its loss; as Weidensaul writes, speaking of Audubon: \u201cSimply imagine the raw spectacle of a healthy, undiminished continent\u2019s worth of songbirds overwashing the winter-gray land with movement and color, the incalculable hundreds of millions of warblers, vireos, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, flycatchers, and more. Even today, after centuries of erosion, the great aerial ballet of spring migration is a staggering thing to see. In those days, it must truly have been breathtaking. The question isn\u2019t why were these men ensnared by America\u2019s birds: the question is why wasn\u2019t everyone struck dumb by them?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alexander Wilson and his brilliant successor, Audubon, properly get a chapter to themselves. As Weidensaul remarks, Wilson may deserve credit as father of American ornithology, but Audubon\u2019s \u201cvery name has become synonymous with birds.\u201d As a painter he was touched by genius, unlike the wooden Wilson; as a self-promoter he had no equal, recreating himself in the capital-R Romantic image of the American frontiersman: \u201cWhereas at Mill Grove he had tried to hide his humble origins and project an air of nobility, when he eventually traveled to England and Scotland in the 1820s to promote his Birds of America, he made sure to look every inch the \u2018American Woodsman\u2019 he proclaimed himself to be . . . it was a shrewd affectation that fit perfectly with the Romantic view of the wilderness then in vogue, and it would have worked equally well in our celebrity-conscious century.\u201d But despite his sometimes-exaggerated compositions and his unreliable writings, it is hard not to see in Audubon the beginnings of the popular image of birds in our society. Weidensaul asks of Audubon and his contemporaries \u201cWhat was it about America\u2019s frontier that kept turning rudderless dreamers, ne\u2019er-do-wells, and idlers into maniacally focused naturalists?\u201d As the frontier moves west, his cast continues to be eccentric, from the Hungarian fantasist Xantus to the German-born and renamed Prussian Charles Bendire. Many were Indian- fighting military men or Army doctors, whose names (Bendire, Coues, Hammond) are now associated with their birds\u2014\u201cmen on horseback with guns\u201d in Weidensaul\u2019s phrase. Another, also introduced in the chapter on Shotgun Ornithology, is a woman, Florence Merriam Bailey. She wrote both the magisterial and still-useful Birds of New Mexico and the first popular bird guide, Birds Through an Opera Glass.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, as Weidensaul says, the narrative fragments. The frontier moved west and closed, while ornithology itself remained rooted (as it still was until well after World War II) in the East, in Boston and New York. Scientific collectors and hunters began their conflict with what Weidensaul aptly calls the \u201cAngry Ladies.\u201d As prominent an ornithologist as William Brewster bought 61 Ivory-billed Woodpecker skins, some from a collector who advertised in the American Ornithologists\u2019 Union (AOU) scientific journal The Auk. When asked in 1902 to address an Audubon Society meeting, the incoming president of the AOU sniffed, \u201cI do not protect birds. I kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The tide was turning, as suffragettes and feminists protested feathered hats and the naturalist Ludlow Griscom began to convince skeptics that he could reliably identify a bird at a distance. Silliness and virtue could characterize both \u201csides.\u201d Some of the protectionists were sentimental about songbirds and perpetrated the \u201cevil hawk\u201d myth, while \u201cthe bloodless sport of field identification\u201d wouldn\u2019t have been possible without shotguns and collectors. But good binoculars and the pioneering artwork of a student of Griscom\u2019s (Roger Tory Peterson) led to a new synthesis. Weidensaul is particularly good on the evolution of the field guide, from Peterson through Sibley and Kaufman, and clearly explains the virtues of each.<\/p>\n<p>He ends with modern birding linking once more with science, giving as an example the banding studies he and fellow amateurs are doing with saw-whet owls. A sentence from this account could ably sum up his book: \u201c[T]his trend has been given the catchy title \u2018citizen science,\u2019 but in fact, this remerging of science and hobby brings ornithology back to its amateur roots in a way that is of immense and immediate benefit to the birds\u2014an integration . . . of the many threads that form the tapestry of American bird study: science, sport, and conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Birding has certainly come of age, and with these two excellent histories it has become possible for those of us who are addicted to this sport (pastime? obsession?) to examine<a class=\"excerpt-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.allaboutbirds.org\/news\/of-a-feather-by-scott-weidensaul\/\" title=\"ReadBook Review: Of a Feather, by Scott Weidensaul\">&#8230; Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_birdpress_living_bird_toc":0,"_birdpress_living_bird_toc_title":"","_birdpress_featured_image":false,"_birdpress_hero_toggle":false,"_birdpress_hero_type":"image","_birdpress_hero_image_type":"image","_birdpress_hero_style":"default","_birdpress_hero_ratio":"","_birdpress_hero_h1":"","_birdpress_hero_media_id":0,"_birdpress_hero_media_array_id":[],"_birdpress_hero_media_array":[],"_birdpress_hero_media":0,"_birdpress_hero_video_id":0,"_birdpress_hero_video":0,"_birdpress_hero_youtube":"","_birdpress_hero_content":true,"_birdpress_hero_byline":"","_birdpress_hero_byline_bottom":"","_birdpress_hero_button_link":"","_birdpress_hero_button_text":"","_birdpress_hero_button_color":"","_birdpress_hero_date":false,"original_guid":"","_birdpress_hide_search":false,"_birdpress_page_width":"","_birdpress_global_cta":false,"_birdpress_widget_sidebar":"","_birdpress_next_article":0,"_birdpress_next_article_title":"","_birdpress_prev_article":0,"_birdpress_prev_article_title":"","_birdpress_sub_navigation_id":0,"_birdpress_sub_navigation":"","_birdpress_sub_navigation_title":false,"_birdpress_anchor_navigation_id":0,"_birdpress_anchor_navigation":"","_birdpress_postType":"both","_birdpress_categoryID":0,"_birdpress_tagID":0,"_birdpress_parentPostID":0,"_birdpress_parentPostTitle":"","_birdpress_menuID":0,"_birdpress_menuName":"","_birdpress_listHeader":"","_birdpress_listLayout":"card-display","_birdpress_listColumns":"","_birdpress_maxItems":12,"_birdpress_listPaginate":true,"_birdpress_displaySort":true,"_birdpress_sortOrder":"DESC","_birdpress_sortBy":"date","_birdpress_listID":"","_birdpress_listClass":"","_birdpress_displayImages":true,"_birdpress_displayCaptions":false,"_birdpress_displayExcerpts":false,"_birdpress_attTop":"","_birdpress_attBottom":"","_birdpress_showLogos":false,"_birdpress_post_logo":0,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_topic":0,"wds_primary_content-format":0,"wds_primary_cornell-lab-project":0,"wds_primary_host-project":0,"wds_primary_read-more-tag":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[998,1044],"content-format":[1055],"cornell-lab-project":[1069],"host-project":[],"read-more-tag":[],"class_list":["post-9687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","topic-news-and-features","topic-reviews-news-and-features","content-format-article","cornell-lab-project-living-bird-magazine"],"metadata":{"associated-posts":[""],"_edit_lock":["1433793763:2"],"_edit_last":["2"],"_thumbnail_id":["9688"],"custom-byline":["<em>Reviewed by Stephen J. 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