Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides

Chapter 1. Field Guides and the New Hobby of Birdwatching

| 14 | In the 1880s and ’90s, someone interested in reading about the birds of New England would have been able to cobble together an array of resources and learn a good deal. There were two comprehensive ornithological manuals in print at the time: Elliot Coues’s Key to North American Birds (1872) and Spencer Baird, Thomas Brewer, and Robert Ridgway’s History of North American Birds (1874). Both feature detailed information about bird anatomy and distribution. If one were looking for more experiential narratives about birds, nineteenth-century writers had produced many volumes of natural history writing about birds. William L. Baily’s Our Own Birds: A Familiar Natural History of the Birds of the United States (1869) and John Burroughs’s popular Wake Robin (1871) are examples of this writing, focusing on the beauty of birds and creating a sense that communing with birds and nature is transcendental.1 Early works of bird illustration could be helpful as well, including expansive projects such as Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina , Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731) and John James Audubon’s The Birds of America (1840). Nineteenth-century periodicals included brief sketches about birds, with Arthur’s Home Magazine running a series called “Chapters on Birds” (1854, 88–89). Ambitious readers might even discover that there was a good deal of information about game birds in field chapter one @ Field Guides and the New Hobby of Birdwatching | 15 guides for hunters such as Gurdon Trumbull’s Names and Portraits of Birds Which Interest Gunners, with Descriptions in Language Understanded of the People (1888). Trumbull’s hunting guide progresses through a list of common game birds species by species, describing each one with brief, vivid, classifying language. Although these resources could be pieced together, compared, and used to help identify birds, none of them could accurately be called a birdwatching field guide. In the 1880s, there was not yet a single resource about the birds of North America that was for nonspecialists, covered all or most species in the region, was portable and easy to use, and focused on identification by sight and/or sound. In the 1880s and ’90s, in the context of what appeared to be the impending extinction of dozens of bird species, several authors filled this niche by creating a new genre of the birdwatching field guide. These new field guides recontextualized and reframed existing information about birds, presenting it in new ways and for new purposes. Not all the authors of these new birdwatching field guides were equally preoccupied with saving birds, and avian protection was closely connected with lethal forms of avian management. But several new field guides were carefully crafted to get readers interested in birdwatching so that they would become advocates for favored and beleaguered birds. In this respect, the new genre was created to put in motion a chain reaction in which a new kind of book (the genre of the field guide) sponsored new practices (birdwatching) that then altered attitudes intended to reverse what “many knowledgeable observers believed” was a rapid decline in bird populations “to the point that irreversible damage would soon occur” (Dorsey 1998, 165). In scholarship about how countercultures are promoted and social change is initiated, considerable attention has been paid to social movements (Morris and Browne 2001) and the vital role of public address in making things happen (Stewart 1997). Understandably, when we think of radical social movements, and environmental movements in particular, we tend to think of great speeches, marches, protests, and other forms of direct action. Work on the rhetoric of the environmentalism has focused on the tactics of street protests (DeLuca and Peeples 2002), direct action (DeLuca 1999), and more recently “toxic tours” that work to educate participants about environmental pollution (Pezzullo 2003, 2007). Field Guides and the New Hobby of Birdwatching 16 | CHAPTER ONE The story of how field guides helped sponsor bird conservation, however , reveals that not all environmental activism is so overt; part of the conservation movement to protect wild birds at the end of the nineteenth century was quiet, subtle, and based on creating new practices and feelings relating to birds. One of the field-guide authors discussed in this chapter, Mabel Osgood Wright, has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, but most of that work has been on Wright’s development of a bird sanctuary, contributions to the Audubon Society, and work as...