Lack of access to published information about biodiversity is one of the major inhibitors to efficient scientific research today. It’s such a longstanding problem, in fact, that it has a name. The taxonomic impediment.

For hundreds of years, scientists and naturalists have published information about Earth’s species in books and journals. Many of these works, however, are available in only a few select libraries, and information about species is often not available within the countries in which those species live.

The taxonomic impediment is a very poignant reality for Paul Smith and his colleagues working in Paraguay. Paul is a freelance naturalist working with FAUNA Paraguay and the Para La Tiera Research Station.

Paul Smith, freelance naturalist working with FAUNA Paraguay and Para La Tiera Research Station.

FAUNA Paraguay is dedicated to the magnificent Paraguayan fauna and serves as an online community promoting the study, conservation, and protection of this fauna and related habitats. The community is working to educate the public about Paraguayan biodiversity, produce related scientific and educational papers, and amass the first open access zoological and ecological library in Paraguay.

The Para La Tiera Research Station is based at the Reserva Natural Laguna Blanca and is working to protect globally threatened South American ecoregions through conservation and research projects and is spreading awareness about these regions through community outreach and scientific publications about related biodiversity.

Paul specializes in the natural history, ecology and distribution of Paraguayan fauna, publishing widely on ornithology, herpetology, mammalogy and entomology. His discovery of BHL through a Google search had a dramatic impact on this work.

“BHL is a gamechanger for people like me working in countries where literature is hard to come by,” lauds Paul. “To be able to consult at the click of a mouse classic old works that used to be impossible to find is revolutionising the way we work here, and the ability to trace modern citations back to their original sources is beginning to provide answers to a lot of the ‘mysteries’ that have stumped us for some time! There is no doubt that this has benefited the scientific community here in Paraguay, and has changed the way we do things. It has certainly opened up biology to a wider audience, and young Paraguayan biologists are finally beginning to flourish. I have no doubt that wider access to key literature has played a key role in that development.”

FAUNA Paraguay ELibrary (which includes many resources from BHL) being used by Para La Tierra museum curator Olga Petko for the identification of specimens in the Laguna Blanca research station.

These days, Paul consults BHL at least weekly, but often more frequently. Furthermore, it has been a major contributor to FAUNA Paraguay’s Library, which is the largest natural history library in the country. A major component of the initiative is the ELibrary. While remote access to books through electronic copies greatly increases the efficiency of scientific research, spotty and slow Internet connections in Paraguay made relying only on online access to books and journals less than ideal and necessitated the creation of an ELibrary that could host local copies of required materials. BHL has served as a major backbone to this ELibrary.

“We have a very slow internet connection here in Paraguay,” explains Paul, “So we habitually download everything we can for inclusion in our ELibrary, especially books and complete runs of journals. That way we know we can have access to it when we need it and not be dependent on internet connection speeds!

“The gigantic collection of PDFs [from BHL] that we have put together forms a notable part of the FAUNA Paraguay library, which is consulted regularly by professionals, students and educators. It has become a major resource for me personally as well as many others, and of course I perform all my literature searches through BHL before looking for the references in our library.

“Access to literature has long been a problem here as of course are funds to visit libraries in other cities. Our library can be consulted in person, but we also provide a service where people can consult our collection at a distance via email and we can carry out literature searches for them and send them PDFs of relevant literature. Of course we always take the opportunity to direct users to BHL, but in some cases it is more convenient for students to request PDFs of specific articles or pages which we can make from the bigger files from BHL that we already have downloaded and then email these to the person who requested it.”

We asked Paul what he would like to see BHL develop or focus on in the future. His response? More partnerships with institutions in developing countries.

“One thing I’d like to see happen is reaching out to institutions in developing countries and asking them to join the digitalization process,” emphasized Paul. “I realise this comes with difficulties, but using the region I work in as an example, there are countless journals, monographs and books produced by museums, scientific societies and clubs (especially in Brazil, Chile and Argentina), many of which have been in print for well over 100 years, and which are still difficult to obtain even now (even if you physically visit the places to try and get copies of them!). Some of these journal titles are no longer in print, some continue to function, but they hold vast amounts of information that is not in copyright and risks being lost forever as the number of hard copies slowly dwindles (it’s becoming more and more the case that old journals are just being thrown away!). I’m sure this is the case all over the developing world, but getting some of those really obscure journals digitalised would be another massive step forward. There is certainly interest in doing this in some of the institutions I have spoken with, but a lack of resources/opportunity seems to be the major stumbling block. Having the opportunity to make their titles available on BHL would I’m sure be the answer that many of these institutions are looking for.”

We are always interested in exploring collaborative opportunities with institutions. You can learn more about our partnership process on this page, and if you’re interested in talking further about collaborations, send us feedback!

So what’s Paul’s favorite feature on BHL? The recent additions page, which provides updates of all the new titles added to BHL each week. As Paul praised, “Searching through the BHL collection online is like finding a treasure chest! The good thing about this treasure chest though is that it keeps getting fuller each week!”

Thank you, Paul, for sharing with us the impact that BHL has on your work and country. Do you use BHL to support your own research? Want to tell us about it? Send an email to [email protected]!

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, an accident of the calendar, which after all leaves us only 365 days to choose from. But this year’s National Bird Day just happens to fall on the 150th anniversary of the birth of a founding figure in North American birding: Lynds Jones.

Who?

The span of communicative memory—events and ideas and traditions passed live from one person to the next—is fixed at 80 or 100 years, the equivalent of three human generations. Few and ever fewer of us were there to witness the publication of the first Peterson guide or the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but the culture of American birdwatching in 2015 still “remembers” those events and the people involved in them. Anything or anyone much older, though, is not memory but history.

Lynds Jones, alas, is history. But on this significant birthday, we should make an effort to remember this 150-year-old, too, as the founder of many of what we think of as characteristic activities in American birding.

Lynds Jones.

Jones was an academic ornithologist—his was the first ornithology course ever offered at an American university, beginning at Oberlin in 1895—but it is in recreational birdwatching where his influence is still most deeply felt, if nowadays only rarely recognized.

Today ends the 2014-2015 season of the Christmas Bird Count. A highlight of many birders’ holiday season, this CBC was officially the 115th since Frank Chapman organized the first tally in December 1900. Noble as Chapman’s initiative was, and as invaluable as it has proved over the years, the idea wasn’t entirely his. Three years before the first count, on December 28, 1897, Lynds Jones and his best birding buddy and frequent co-author, William Leon Dawson, conducted what was a Christmas Count in all but name. The day was “just sharp enough to give zest to out-door life without discomfort,” and Jones and Dawson’s census detected 74 individuals of 11 species within a circle centered on downtown Oberlin. Jones noted that the little party was undeterred by “such little things as high picket and wire fences, thorny hedge-rows, inquisitive house-keepers, and threatened incarceration as lunatics”—plus ça change….

Counting—listing—would be the defining activity in Jones’s birding for the rest of his life. He required of his ornithology students at Oberlin that they keep a daily bird list in

a quadrille-ruled note-book dated at the top, with a line for weather, one for start and return, one for locality…. In the squares, on a level with the name of each species, and under the date, abbreviations are entered indicating where the species was seen… about how many seen, whether singing or silent….

And the professor was right there with them, keeping obsessive track. In 1898, Jones and Dawson took 87 birding trips from Oberlin. They reported in the Wilson Bulletin—Jones was the journal’s editor—that those excursions had recorded no fewer than 175 bird species for the year in Lorain County, Ohio. The year’s tally included twelve noteworthy rarities, among them a first county record of the Bewick’s Wren; Jones added four species to his county list, Dawson seven.

It’s all very familiar, isn’t it? So, too, are the justifications Jones offers for what must have seemed even then an otherwise rather pointless endeavor: the year’s “horizon,” as he and Dawson termed their efforts, had been occasion for the observers to improve their health by spending more time outdoors, and the team had “aroused public sentiment in favor of the birds.”

Not everyone had the leisure to conduct a big year, but almost any birder could get away for a “daily bird horizon.” In several of the years just before and after 1900, Jones was running a big day almost every month, reporting excitedly on new record tallies in the pages of the Wilson Bulletin. His account of a March effort strikes all of the same rhetorical notes that remain obligatory in writing about such activities even now:

The birds were everywhere…. At the end of the third mile there were 23 species recorded in my book, equaling the best previous record…. Had the weather been more favorable, it seems reasonable to suppose that the list for the day would have been even larger…. In the vicinity of the lake many of the species literally swarmed…. The list does not include ten species that were beyond question in the county on March 12. In spite of that this record is a phenomenal one in every way and will not soon be broken.

Not until the next year, at least.

Jones was an enthusiastic “patch birder,” happiest, it seems, birding in his own Ohio county. In the summer of 1900, though, he and Dawson made a 7000-mile trip west to the Pacific and back; Jones kept the lists, obsessively, tallying every species seen from the train window and in the field. The Wilson Bulletin began to look like an eBird report avant la lettre as Jones listed the 309 species recorded on the journey, “181 of them being new to the writer’s life list.”

It was a sign of the growing gulf between scientific ornithology and birdwatching that Jones and Dawson’s “Reconnoissance” attracted swift and withering criticism. The Condor reviewer admitted in the abstract that keeping lists “when speeding through the country on a railway flyer” could be useful, but Jones’s lists from various localities were “worthless.” Jones’s only defense was that “it was not intended that the results have any general scientific value,” a fateful admission if ever there was one. Nonetheless, he continued to publish censuses and horizons, his own and others’, in the pages of the Wilson Bulletin.

By 1916, however, the enthusiasm for publishing species lists appears to have peaked. Jones’s solicitation of reports went largely unanswered, and in the following year, Waldron DeWitt Miller and Charles H. Rogers published a truly serious criticism of big days on the Jonesian plan:

The value of [a] census… lies more in the accuracy of the count of individual birds … than in the total number of species noted.

Jones came around to the same view in an editorial note published in the Wilson Bulletin in 1924:

Time was when a mere enumeration of the birds that were to be found in some political division could be looked upon as a contribution to our knowledge of the science of Ornithology. For a large part of North America that is no longer true…. Your Editor… does not believe that mere enumeration of the species warrants the cost of publication.

Jones retired as Editor at the end of the year.

The Wilson Bulletin—now the Wilson Journal of Ornithology—would go on to become one of the preeminent scientific publications in the world. And it would largely leave American birdwatching behind. As ornithology became increasingly technical, birding grew ever more recreational, taking for its model the censuses, the horizons, and the frantic—and usually meaningless—record-keeping pioneered by Lynds Jones, the most influential birder most of us have never heard of.

Lynds Jones.

Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The Osprey. v. 1 (1896-97). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/8767127

The artwork of Puerto Rican-American Louis Agassiz Fuertes has been featured a few times before on the BHL blog. His paintings are beautiful and eye-catching, and always a treat to visit. Through titles available in BHL, we can even see the evolution of Fuertes’s career— from his earliest professional work to his last.

The Ithaca-born ornithologist and artist often drew as a young child, sketching domestic animals and wild birds alike. Earliest recording of his painting birds was at the age of 14 when he was determined to capture the unusual beak of a Red Crossbill. At a young age, his work started to garner him some notoriety with professors at Cornell and the local community, even resulting in an exhibit hosted by the local Christian Association. By 17 he’d even become an Associate Member of the American Ornithologists Union.

However, when he entered Cornell University, Fuertes’s career was still in question. At the time there weren’t any courses in ornithology at Cornell, and his father (despite urgings from his peers) at first did not see how his son’s artistic leanings could provide a suitable life. As a result, Fuertes took courses in architecture.

It was a chance meeting that changed everything. On a trip to Washington, D.C. with the Cornell University Glee Club, Fuertes met with a friend’s uncle. This uncle just happened to be ornithologist Elliot Coues, a founding member of the American Ornithologists Union.

Nest of Western Gnatcatcher. A-Birding on a Bronco. (1896) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12789735

Coues recognized Fuertes’s potential, and provided him with advice and material support to encourage his scientific and artistic pursuits. It was clear Fuertes was to become a professional painter of birds, and after college he studied under naturalist and artist Abbott H. Thayer. The two would become quite close, even so far as considering one another family.

Some of Fuertes’s earliest artwork can be found in publications for Cornell University. However his first professional illustrations were printed in A-birding on a Bronco (1896) by Florence Merriam Bailey, published just one year before Fuertes graduated from Cornell. The pen-and-ink drawings mark the start of a career that would eventually have Fuertes in high demand. Although considered his early works, it is clear Fuertes’s youthful sketching had paid off, resulting in a well-developed style demonstrated in detailed images of birds, their nests, and the surrounding flora.

The Little Lover. A-Birding on a Bronco. (1896) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12789693

It’s no surprise that Coues would write to The Osprey to note: “[My] examination of a great many of his designs, both in black-and-white and in natural colors, makes me think Mr. Fuertes the most promising young artist of birds now living, and one whose work already places him in the very first rank.”

It’s an interesting look at the early period of Fuertes’s thirty-year career, during which he would become, not just a prolific artist, but a well-liked and admired colleague and professor. His contemporaries would note his kind, light-hearted nature, and his lectures at Cornell would garner a full house at attention. In the tradition of 19th-century professors who considered themselves poets, Albert W. Smith would recite a memorial poem about Fuertes wherein he says, “under touches of his magic brush,/The canvass [sic] came alive.” Smith would go on to say:

All children knew at once he was their friend;
All men and women felt his lasting charm.
He loved all lovely things that love men’s hearts;
And when he found new beauty, lo, he turned
To share it with some friend.

His kind nature would extend to how he treated his specimens, one account noting how he would stroke and coo at a recently shot bird. This love of birds and sympathetic nature are often repeated in articles and obituaries written about him.

In the end Louis shared the natural beauty of the world not just with those around him, but with the general public who had a growing interest in the natural world. His final contributions were the paintings for Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals (1930), the originals of which managed to survive unscathed in the car accident which killed Fuertes in 1927. Many publications which feature Fuertes’s artwork remain available to the public, dozens of which are offered through the BHL.

This blog post is a preview of two upcoming Biodiversity Library Exhibitions on women naturalists, and Latino natural history. The exhibitions are sponsored by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, and will highlight several women and Latino naturalists represented in the BHL collection.