Of a Feather by Scott Weidensaul

Author:Scott Weidensaul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

A banker who abandoned a promising career to study birds, Frank Chapman left a remarkable legacy both in science and conservation, making several important strides in the evolution of the modern field guide.

Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library

Chapman’s Color Key was a reasonable success, so much so that he brought out a second, expanded edition in 1912. But in the meantime, Chapman’s illustrator, a young man from Worcester, Massachusetts, named Chester Reed, had been busy—and the books he published in 1906 would quickly eclipse everything else that had been written for beginning birders.

Nature was the Reed family business; Chester’s father, Charles K. Reed, a onetime housepainter, billed himself as a “Dealer in Instruments and Supplies for Ornithologists, Oologists, Entomologists, Botanists, Mineralologists and Taxidermists. Also, Birds’ Skins, Birds’ Eggs, Minerals, Shells and Curiosities.” (The senior Reed had acquired the business in the 1880s from Edward H. Forbush, who went on to become a noted New England ornithologist.)

Unfortunately, the elder Reed fell afoul of New York Audubon in 1904, accused of taking birds and eggs in violation of the new protection laws, and he moved away from selling eggs and skins. Books, however, were another aspect of the Reed family business, and a successful one at that. Starting in 1901, they began to publish a high-end monthly magazine, edited by Chester, called American Ornithology, devoted to a series of life-history sketches in each issue, and which was later released in book form “for home or school.” But Reed’s biggest success was two oddly shaped little books that appeared in 1906, published by Doubleday. They were long and narrow, about the size of a modern checkbook, each simply titled Bird Guide; one covered waterbirds, game birds, and raptors, and the other covered songbirds of North America from the Great Plains east. Each page had a color painting and several hundred words of text describing the bird’s plumage, voice, and range.

Reed’s guides were a sensation, becoming, almost overnight, the most popular guidebooks for anyone just starting to watch birds. Why did they catch on, when Chapman’s far more comprehensive Color Key did not? The price probably had something to do with it; at just seventy-five cents per volume, they were within the reach of most people, including parents looking for a gift for children, whereas Chapman’s book cost more than three times as much. Unlike Reed’s previous work for Chapman, here the artist could create attractive paintings of the birds in a swatch of their habitats, and he often included females and immatures. But it was the practicality of the book that won the most converts—instead of a three-hundred-page brick like Chapman’s Key, these guides were truly pocket-sized. They were easy to use, fun to read, not too intimidating in their scope, and people gobbled them up. They sold three hundred thousand copies in five years, and more than half a million by the early 1930s.

The Reed books were obviously not without their flaws; they depicted only some of the birds, and covered only part of the continent.

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