464 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY IN NORWAY 



By Dr. R. W. SHUFELDT 



NEW YORK 



A S any general reader of the magazines in this country thoroughly 

 -£-*- appreciates, there has been within the last twenty years a won- 

 derful and widespread interest taken in the matter of photography 

 of birds, their nests and their haunts. There is not a month that 

 passes without some one of the larger magazines, or even several of 

 them, publishing a bird article illustrated with a series of photographic 

 reproductions from nature, and these are often from the pens of our 

 best-known ornithologists. The effect has been that many of our com- 

 moner bird forms are now coming to be quite generally known, which 

 was by no means the case forty or more years ago. But the United 

 States does not stand alone in the production of this class of literature, 

 and, old as the old world is, it has not come to be so antiquated that 

 people no longer take any interest in its avifauna; indeed, the old 

 adage that ' familiarity breeds contempt ' by no means applies here, 

 for, as a matter of fact, the very reverse of the proverb holds true, and 

 the better we come to know the birds, the more ready are we to 

 recognize the fascination of their closer acquaintance. 



Having been a student of the world's ornithology for a period ex- 

 tending over forty years, and a continuous writer on the subject for a 

 quarter of a century, the birds of Europe are nearly as well known to 

 me as those of my own country, and the life histories of some of them 

 mean quite as much to me. In this way I have become as familiar 

 with the birds of a country like Norway as I am with those of any part 

 of the United States, and some of them I have studied quite as closely, 

 their habits as well as their anatomy. Now the Scandinavian camer- 

 ists have not been idle in the making of life photographs of the 

 birds of the North European region in general and of Norway in 

 particular. Among these workers no one is better known, or more 

 distinguished, than the veteran Norse naturalist, Professor Robert 

 Collett, professor of zoology at the University of Christiania, who has 

 been a correspondent of the writer's since the early eighties. Pro- 

 fessor Collett spends his summer vacations in rambling over the most 

 interesting parts of Norway, during which times he captures many 

 bird pictures with his camera. He has kindly illustrated the present 

 article for me and supplied some of the notes. 



When one comes to study the land birds of Norway, one soon ascer- 

 tains that many of them are resident species, a still greater number 



