Connecting Content: The Wonderful World of Field Books

The California Academy of Sciences and our partners (all of whom are also BHL member institutions) are in the midst of a 3 year IMLS National Leadership Grant titled “Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field Notes to Specimens and Published Literature.” This project aims to digitize published scientific findings, their related field books and specimens, and metadata for these items, link all of these resources, and make them available for harvesting, reuse, and repurposing without cost. At this point, the bulk of the field books selected for this project have been digitized and made available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. (*You can see the sixty-one titles digitized for this project by searching for “Connecting Content” in the BHL search box.) You can download a selection of these field book for free via the latest BHL iTunes U Collection: Connecting Content through Archival Field Notes.

Field books (or field notes) are the original documents which chronicle specimen collection and the events and observations that led to scientific discovery.  Field books are unique unto the creator and vary greatly from book to book. Here are a selection of highlights from the collection which demonstrate the wealth of information and styles found throughout the selection of field books:

William Whitman Bailey and the USGS Exploration of the 40th Parallel

Page One. A diary of a journey in California and Nevada. William Whitman Bailey.

Portuguese Man of War. Bailey.

Riccinus communis. Bailey.

William Whitman Bailey’s life story reads like a blockbuster movie plot. When young William was just nine years old, he and his family took an ill fated boat trip aboard the 198 foot side-wheeler, the Henry Clay. On this fateful day, the Henry Clay was involved in a minor collision with another vessel, but pressed onwards as it seemed that the ship has sustained little damage. However, about an hour outside of its final New York destination, the ship beached itself on shore near Yonkers as a result of a fire that had been burning unnoticed since the collision. The lucky passengers on the bow of the ship were either thrown or able to jump onto land, but the Baileys were not so fortunate. Separated from land by 140 feet of water and a wall of fire, the Baileys had no choice but to jump into the water as the fire approached. William’s mother and sister succumbed to the depths and his father barely survived. William managed to grab hold of a floating wicker chair and was eventually picked up by a passing ship, but the experience would leave him with permanent health problems.

However, this tragic setback did not lessen Bailey’s enthusiasm for adventure and curiosity about the natural world. Bailey would eventually study under Dr. Asa Gray at Harvard University and at 24 years old, he became the botanist for the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. The field book for this expedition chronicles Bailey’s journey through California and Nevada in a flowing prosaic style with beautiful illustrations and photographs of Bailey’s observations. The very first page of Bailey’s journal opens with a beautiful demonstration of his illustrative pen and ink style. Bailey’s rich descriptions are paired with exquisite drawings that seem to jump off the page whether he is waxing poetic about the Portuguese Man of War or closely observing the leaf of the Riccinus communis. Bailey’s flowing narrative style and gorgeous illustrations make this field book a charming and informative look at the exploration of the 40th parallel that will surely captivate readers.

Washington H. Ochsner and the Galapagos Islands

Charles Island. Ochsner.

In 1905, the California Academy of Sciences sent 11 men off for a year and a day on an eighty-five foot schooner destined for the Galapagos Islands. While the expedition was underway, the California Academy of Sciences would fall into ruin during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The specimens gathered during the Galapagos expedition would come to form the crux of the new California Academy of Sciences’ collections. Of the young men on that voyage, 26 year-old Washington Henry Ochsner travelled as the expedition’s geologist. His journals are more technical than Bailey’s in what they intended to capture and often included geological survey information, as well as inferences about how the geological features were formed. Ochsner also drew detailed surveys of the island terrains like this map of Charles Island. Ochsner’s field books have a scientifically focused structure and tend to be not-so-much a diary but a close and careful record of his scientific observations.

The Diaries of William Brewster, 1865- 1919

Eggs and Nests. Brewster.

Renowned ornithologist William Brewster mused over his daily observations in a personal and often humorous way. William Brewster’s love of ornithology blossomed early, and he kept careful records of the birds he observed throughout his life. These journals begin when Brewster was 14 years old, and it is interesting to see how his hand, knowledge, and confidence all develop over time.  In his later journals, Brewster takes care to write in a colloquial manner, and these notes provide unique insight into the daily life of a researcher over a 54 year span. This collection of journals also provide an enticing perspective on the detrimental changes to the environment and bird populations as a result of industrialization and the growth of urban centers.

All of the field books digitized for the Connecting Content project offer inimitable insight into how scientific data is gathered, synthesized, and extrapolated. It is the hope that by sharing these unique resources, researchers can better understand scientific findings and that the insights gained from this will promote further inquiry and the spirit of discovery.

Want more Field Book Content?

View 61 field books digitized by the Connecting Content grant in BHL

Download a selection of these books for free on iTunes U

Find out more about the link between expeditions, field books, and publications in our previous blog posts with Smithsonian’s Field Book Project: Post One | Post Two | Post Three

Alexander Wilson

It’s almost a year now since we moved to Bloomfield, and I’m still not over my disappointment at our new New Jersey home’s failure to honor its most distinguished citizen. Not a statue, not a plaque to be found anywhere; and that short boulevard leading to the cemetery turns out, alas, to be named for Woodrow.

Alexander Wilson, the Father of American Ornithology, served as schoolmaster in our little town for a few months in 1801. Wilson’s teaching in Bloomfield was “spirit-sinking, laborious work,” and he doesn’t seem to have found much intellectual stimulus outside the classroom either, complaining in a poem dated August 7 that:

Here bull-headed Ignorance gapes and is courted,
And pale Superstition with visage distorted.
Sweet Science and Truth, while these monsters they cherish,
Like the Babes of the Wood are abandoned to perish.

Wilson got out as soon as he could, and by February 1802 he was back among the sophisticates of Philadelphia.

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If only he’d managed to stick around.

By 1877—sixty-four years after Wilson’s untimely death 200 years ago this August—Bloomfield was a veritable hotbed of ornithological activity. Of the 21 New Jersey amateurs listed in Willard’s Directory of the Ornithologists of the United States, no fewer than four give Bloomfield as their mailing address.

William Brewster

All four, admittedly, were small-time collectors.

Up in Cambridge, William Brewster’s personal holdings that year comprised 6500 specimens, valued at the enormous sum of $5000. Here in Bloomfield, our colleagues had much smaller collections, each of them containing just a few dozen eggs and none of them worth more than $20.

The largest collection in our little town, that belonging to J.L. Adams, held 75 eggs; that makes the average specimen worth a little more than a quarter, the going price a few years later for the shell of a Black Skimmer or a Loggerhead Shrike. The smaller cabinets of Henry D. Davenport, Wm. F. Day, and E.C. Farrand were just as modest, with the average value per egg between twenty and twenty-five cents.

Egg plate by John Ridgway from Bendire’s Life Histories

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None of these Bloomfield Four seems to have left more than a trace in the written record of American birding and ornithology. Their reticence was more than made up for by Bloomfield’s leading ornithologist a generation later, Louis Slidell Kohler.

Kohler’s family was living in Bloomfield by the early 1890s; he seems to have divided his final years—starting around 1919—between Hawthorne and a farm near Paterson, where he died sometime after 1926.

Kohler began his bird studies in Bloomfield, exploring a twenty-acre farm near his house that he called “The Haunt.” He applied for membership in the Cooper Ornithological Club in 1909, and was elected an associate member of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1910. His notes, lists, and essays appeared over the years in the Auk, the Wilson Bulletin, and the Oologist. Unlike the earlier Bloomfieldians, and refreshing for his generation, Kohler does not seem to have been much of a collector; his published articles report on the birds observed—not shot and stuffed—on his “jaunts” and “tramps” through what was still the countryside of northern New Jersey.

Kohler’s observations in The Wilson Bulletin

Kohler’s publications include documentation of range expansions, winter irruptions, and notable migration events. Like most of us, he made the occasional error, as when he reported the nest of a Wilson’s Warbler in New Jersey—dismissed, almost certainly correctly, by the editor of the Auk as “a case of mistaken identity.”

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Starling

In the spring of 1903, Louis Kohler put Bloomfield firmly on the ornithological map with his sighting of a flock of fifteen European Starlings “in the neighborhood of a refuse pile on a farm”—probably “The Haunt.” The birds lingered until July, conspicuous for “their odd gyrations while in the air and methods of alighting on the ground.” When the flock returned the following March, it had grown to 200 birds, which soon “broke up into pairs and began seeing nesting places…. in cupolas, on station poles of the telephone companies and in deserted woodpecker nest holes.” Soon enough, starlings were ejecting Northern Flickers, Eastern Bluebirds, and other birds from their nests, and Kohler was “almost convinced that the time is not far off when they will become as obnoxious as the omnipresent [House Sparrow] is to us now.”

He was right.

In August 1911, Robert Barbour—himself a member of the Cooper Club and of the AOU—described in the pages of the New York Times a flock of 60,000 starlings, House Sparrows, Common Grackles, and American Robins roosting on Bloomfield Avenue just across the Montclair line.

What with the excrement of the birds, the feathers that they shed, and the leaves that they dislodged, sidewalks and piazza steps would be like a poultry yard or worse. The odor, I am told, at times made it unpleasant to use the piazzas in the evening, and those going out in the evening found it desirable to walk in the middle of the street in the interest of personal cleanliness.

Violence was inevitable. On August 30, Peter Stevens, “was arraigned before Justice of the Peace Cadmus of Bloomfield, [for] shooting five starlings” two weeks earlier. The charges had been brought by State Game Warden Frederick J. Hall of Bloomfield, and the City of Montclair wasted no time in issuing a formal denial that it had in any way authorized the shootings. Stevens, “a colored man in the employ of the Montclair Street Department,” was fined the exorbitant sum of $100—$20 a bird. Stevens could not pay, and was jailed for two days.

To its great credit, Montclair stepped up at the end of those two days and filed an appeal on Stevens’s behalf, arguing that the confession he signed had been obtained in an “irregular” fashion. How the case was concluded, and how the dynamics of race, social standing, and urban rivalry were finally played out, I do not know. Montclair swore to take its defense of Stevens to the Supreme Court if necessary, though public opinion was clearly against him, as shown by the scores of letters from all parts of New Jersey asking that the persons responsible for the killing of the birds be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Pearson on Peter Stevens’s Starlings

Gilbert Pearson, reviewing the matter in Bird Lore, took satisfaction in the affair as evidence of the rapidly increasing refinement of sentiment that comes with advancing civilization. It is a most positive fact that, the more cultured the community, the greater the esteem in which the wild bird is held.

Even starlings.

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It’s easy to feel like a pioneer in a new place, as if everything new to us is, simply, new. How much richer the experience of novelty, though, when we realize that there is a past behind us, a past inhabited by the rightly famous, the nearly unknown, and the unjustly notorious. That is just the sort of knowledge that can help make any little town into our little town.

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