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    All Featured Books
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    Page Frights
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    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts in Featured Books

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Happy Moth Week!

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Happy Moth Week! National Moth Week is an annual event that celebrates the diversity and magnificence of moths. By partnering with online biological databases, National Moth Week encourages everyone to become a citizen scientist by helping map moth distributions and provide information about these amazing species. BHL is celebrating moth week by highlighting select species gleaned from one of our favorite BHL books: Butterflies and Moths: Shown to the Children (1910).

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July 22, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

From Billions to None: The Story of the Passenger Pigeon

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Ohio, 1854. A dense, black shadow begins to creep across the northern edges of the horizon, slowly but incessantly blotting out a bright cerulean sky. Residents take notice, and pour out of their homes and businesses to stare in wide-eyed awe and trepidation at the phenomena edging towards them. Hours pass, and the sky is hurled into unwavering darkness. Finally, as the day fades, the sun itself succumbs to this nameless power. Men and women fall to their knees in prayer, begging for deliverance from the Revelational apocalypse.
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July 15, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

Once There Were Billions: Heath Hen

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To help tell the story of four extinct bird species, BHL and the Smithsonian Libraries co-curated an exhibition–Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America–at the National Museum of Natural History.  The exhibit runs through October 2015 and provides insights into the fragile connections between species and their environment.  If you’re not in the area, you can still enjoy the online exhibit or browse digital versions of the select exhibit books in BHL.

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July 9, 2014byCarolyn Sheffield
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

Once There Were Billions: Carolina Parakeet

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At this time of year, those of us in the U.S. often find our eyes turned skyward to admire a brilliant array of colors lighting up the night sky in celebration of America’s independence.  Up until about a hundred years ago, a colorful display of another kind filled the North American skies, and not just on the fourth of July. Jewel-colored Carolina Parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis) traveled in huge, noisy flocks from southern New York and Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, favoring old forests along rivers. Although they looked tropical, Carolina Parakeets didn’t migrate south in the winter but weathered the cold. As their forests were cut to make space for farms, the parrots were shot for feeding on crops and orchards.

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July 3, 2014byCarolyn Sheffield
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

Once There Were Billions: The Great Auk

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Once an amazing diversity of birds–some in breathtaking abundance–inhabited the vast forests and plains of North America. But starting around 1600, some species began to disappear, as humans altered habitats, over-hunted, and introduced predators. A notable extinction occurred 100 years ago, with the death of Martha the Passenger Pigeon, the last member of a species that once filled America’s skies.

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June 20, 2014byCarolyn Sheffield
BHL News, Blog Reel, Featured Books

Nine Smithsonian Field Books Now in BHL!

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that nine of the Smithsonian field books that were cataloged and imaged as part of the Field Book Project are now available through the BHL portal! With over 43 million pages of the published biodiversity literature, BHL has greatly improved the efficiency of access to the published literature–much of which was previously available in limited physical copies in but a few select libraries in the developed world.

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June 12, 2014byCarolyn Sheffield
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Transcribing the Field Notes of William Brewster

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William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was an avid collector of birds and their nests and eggs, and collected over forty thousand specimens from 1861 until his death in 1919. His collection, bequeathed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Though Brewster collected throughout North America, his collection is especially comprehensive in its coverage of the birds of New England. Brewster thoroughly documented his collecting trips.

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June 5, 2014byPatrick Randall
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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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