A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects by David Callahan & David Callahan

Author:David Callahan & David Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408186664
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

51 : Ernest Holt newspaper cutting

1928

Further inspiration for the travelling birder and photographer came from illustrated reports of bird-seeking expeditions like those of Ernest Holt, which demonstrated the feasibility of seeing and capturing for posterity near-mythical species like Sunbittern.

The date of 7 April 1928 is not often mentioned in history books, but it has a hitherto unsung importance in ornithology’s timeline. On this day, the National Geographic Society and Carnegie Institution announced that “foremost American authority on bird life” Ernest G Holt would lead an expedition to Venezuela to attempt to track down wintering populations of North America’s summer visitors.

This was far from the first ever bird-seeking expedition, but it had a succinct difference: “In the course of his study,” continued Florida’s St Petersburg Times, “Holt will amass photographs and collections of such wonder birds as the scarlet ibis with its brilliant red plumage, which is the envy of the textile dye maker; the cock-of-the-rock, with its curious double crest … and the ungainly jabiru stork … which stands higher than our sandhill crane.” Holt was embarking on the first ever bird photography trip.

Amass photographs he did, returning with specimens and images of more than 3,000 individuals of 486 species from his often perilous journey, greatly adding to what was then known about the variety and distribution of South American birds. There were already a number of bird and nature photography books dealing with western avifauna, including William Nesbitt’s How to Hunt with the Camera (1926), and the hobby was growing domestically, but Holt was the first photographer to travel to an inaccessible destination specifically to at least partly document its birds. That he did this amid considerable logistical difficulty with a plate camera makes it a monumental achievement, and is even more to his credit.

Holt’s life was remarkable in other ways. Not only was he an innovative and intrepid ornithologist and photographer, but his first major expedition was with Percy Fawcett in 1920, a character on whom the fictional cinematic archaeologist Indiana Jones was based. Holt fell out with Fawcett during the abortive and traumatising trek to the Amazon, and was not invited on Fawcett’s next expedition, during which he disappeared for good, creating a press sensation at the time. Holt went on to have a brilliant career, both in the scientific world, publishing in The Auk, and in the public eye, writing about his travels for National Geographic.

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