wunder beta📘 A History of North American Birds
You are holding a bird skin whose label is a Latin name and a place. The three volumes on the table were written, in 1874, to make that not enough. Spencer F. Baird, Thomas M. Brewer, and Robert Ridgway publish A History of North American B
What you’ll learn
- A skin is not a lifeSee the 1874 land-bird volumes as a life-history project — distribution, habits, nests, eggs, names — written to outrun a labelled skin.Little, Brown, 1874. Three volumes, 64 plates, 593 woodcuts. North of Mexico, including Greenland and Alaska. A third of a century after Audubon.
- Three pens, one title pageSeparate Baird and Ridgway’s technical matter, Ridgway’s Raptores, Brewer’s habits, and the Smithsonian letter-file that a cabinet could not supply.Ridgway is twenty-three. Gill defines the class; Coues supplies the family tables and Vol. III glossary. Kennicott, MacFarlane, Dall, and the Yukon men are evidence.
- Habitat is evidenceRead range and habitat as claims: Sage Thrasher in artemisia wastes; Townsend’s fences on the Rocky Mountain Bluebird, not the Western; blanks on Townsend’s and Bachman’s Warblers.Ridgway’s sage brush. Townsend’s Sialia arctica on fences. Pine-creeping Warbler on bark and ground. Bachman’s Warbler: one Smithsonian skin, nest unknown.
- Names are working hypothesesTreat the 1874 arrangement as a provisional key, already modified from Baird 1858, and keep locality while checking current names.Coues: provisionally adopted. Plate VII’s chickadee varieties. Sage Thrasher’s synonymy from Orpheus to Oreoscoptes. Sialia arctica is now currucoides.
- Leave the gaps openKeep the method — specimen, place, season, source, blank — and leave 1874 collecting and old names in history.Spotted Owl: nothing on record. Water birds promised 1874, published 1884 as two volumes. Watch one bird this week and write the place.
Questions this course answers
What does the 1874 preface mean by a bird’s life history?
Baird’s preface lists geographical distribution, habits, methods of nesting, character of eggs, popular nomenclature, and other points connected with life history.
Match the 1874 labor to the person the preface actually names
Preface: Baird and Ridgway on technical matter; Ridgway entirely on Raptores; Brewer on all habits; Gill on the class definition; Coues on the tables and the glossary beginning at Vol. III p. 535.
In what year were the three land-bird volumes first published?
Title page and copyright, Little, Brown, Boston, 1874. Preface dated Smithsonian Institution, January 8, 1874. Project Gutenberg’s copy is a 1905 reprint of that text. The water-bird continuation is 1884.
Who, in these volumes, 'confined themselves to the fences in the neighborhood of settlements'?
Vol. I, Sialia arctica. Townsend near the Platte and on the Columbia. Cooper’s December roadsides-and-fences note belongs to Sialia mexicana, a different account.
How should you treat the book’s families and genera?
Coues: provisionally adopted for convenient determination of North American species. The arrangement is essentially Baird 1858, modified somewhat after Sundevall.
Put the pieces of a 1874 species account in the order the book actually builds them
The preface’s method: cabinet first, then the Smithsonian correspondence, then Brewer’s life-history prose, under a classification Coues calls provisional.
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