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    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with ornithology

Blog Reel, Featured Books

How Many Buntings? Revisiting the Relationship Between Linnaeus and Catesby

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Not many birds bedazzle as thoroughly as the adult male Painted Bunting. No matter how many you’ve seen or how often, every one remains a source of startlement, whether it is emerging shyly from a Florida thicket, swaying on a heavy grass halm in the deserts of Arizona, or chewing steadily at a feeder in snowy Massachusetts. This, the most gaudily colored bird north of Mexico, is guaranteed to create a stir.

That stir was even greater three hundred years ago, when European natural historians first confronted this novel beauty. So colorful was the bird that the first scientists to describe it believed that it must be native to regions even more exotic than America. Eleazar Albin, in the notes accompanying his or his daughter Elizabeth Albin’s 1737 engraving of the species, reported that the bird had been brought to England from China for the pleasure “of a curious Gentleman” (Albin 1738). A dozen years on, Linnaeus, having failed to find the bird described or depicted in the handbooks available to him, diagnosed it as a new species, which he inscrutably named Emberiza ciris, and determined that with so brightly colored a plumage, the specimens could have come only from India (Linnaeus 1750).

With the benefit of nearly three centuries’ hindsight, such wild geographic speculation was strictly speaking unnecessary. As early as the 1720s, the natural historian Mark Catesby had seen, drawn, and described the Painted Bunting in southeastern North America, an account that he published in London in 1729 (Catesby 1729).

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December 5, 2019byRick Wright
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Our Experience Digitising a Rare Book for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Recently, we spent three weeks on student placement at Museums Victoria Library and were fortunate enough to be involved with the digitisation of the beautiful title The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant by Gregory M. Mathews. It was an eye-opening experience, making us aware of the patience and attention to detail that is a necessity for book digitisation.

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October 10, 2019byMarina Hunt and Brendan Bachmann
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Elizabeth Gould: An Accomplished Woman

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The beautiful lithographs produced by Elizabeth Gould show lively birds of all shapes and colors performing mating displays, protecting their young, and interacting with their environments. A far cry from the dead-bird-on-stick approach to book illustration of the 18th century and prior, Elizabeth’s birds are reminiscent of the more dynamic figures depicted by John James Audubon; in fact, distinguished ornithologist Prideaux John Selby proclaimed “I like [Elizabeth’s illustrations] as well as Audubon’s.”

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March 18, 2019byAlexandra K. Alvis
Blog Reel, User Stories

A Book’s Eight Year Journey to the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Fulfilling a Researcher’s Digitization Request and Advancing Science

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As an early work in the history of Linnaean taxonomy, Beredeneerde catalogus van eene, by uitstek fraaye en weergaalooze verzameling, zoo van inlandsche als uitheemsche vogelen, viervoetige en gekorvene dieren (i.e. Vroeg’s Catalogue, 1764) by Adrian Vroeg is the source of dozens of new species of birds. Published just six years after the 10th edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae — considered the starting point of zoological nomenclature — the work is extremely rare, with only a handful of copies known to exist worldwide.

Because of the work’s age and rarity, first-hand access to the title has been difficult, and many researchers have had to rely on secondary sources for Vroeg’s names, which may have introduced errors or even overlooked the priority of a name established by Vroeg.

“It is absolutely rare that the scientific community gets access to such an early work in which new names were established after 1758,” explains Dr. Francisco Welter-Schultes of the Zoological Institute of Göttingen University in Germany. “Imagine being able to finally view an original spelling of a name that might not have been verified for more than 100 years. Generations of scientists never reliably saw the correct spellings of these names.”

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December 13, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

BHL Adds Volumes from Wilson Ornithological Society

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More volumes from the Wilson Ornithological Society are now on BHL!  Spanning back to 1893, the publications The Wilson Bulletin and The Wilson Journal of Ornithology are a great example of the kind of legacy literature that distinguishes BHL.

The Wilson Ornithological Society is the second largest ornithological society in North America. The organization of professional scientists and dedicated amateurs is named for Alexander Wilson, known as the “Father of American Ornithology”.

The Wilson Journal of Ornithology is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that replaces its predecessor, The Wilson Bulletin. BHL had previously added some earlier public domain volumes of The Wilson Bulletin, but was able to expand the collection thanks to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Wilson Ornithological Society granted permission to share these titles on BHL with a 5-year embargo on the most recently published volumes, so that now BHL has The Bulletin from 1894-2005 and The Journal from 2006-2010.

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July 26, 2018byElizabeth Meyer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

From ‘Shotgun Ornithology’ to Nature Conservation: Scientific Stories and Data from the Field Notes of William Brewster

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William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

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April 5, 2018byElizabeth Meyer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Exploring the Birds of Canada

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Did someone say Spring?!

In Ottawa, we start to see the Canada Geese returning to their summer nesting grounds around this time of year. Large flocks of them fly overhead in the same v-shaped formations we saw months ago when they left in the late fall.​

Aren’t migratory birds fascinating? Along with so many other Canadian bird species.

Birds of Canada by Percy Algernon Taverner remains one of the best accounts of the kinds of birds that occur in Canada. And the first thirty-six pages holds just the right amount of information to open the science of ornithology to bird lovers, yet still enough information to satisfy research needs.​

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March 22, 2018byElizabeth Smith
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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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