Ralph Hoffmann: 
Unsung Guide to the Birds 
Early bird guides concentrated on birds in the hand; a New 
England schoolmaster produced the first for birds in the bush 
by Harold Swanton 
Elliott Coues was not one to mince 
words. “The double-barrelled shotgun,” 
he wrote in his 1874 Manual of Field 
Ornithology , 
is your main reliance. Under some circum- 
stances you may trap or snare birds, catch 
them with bird-lime, or use other devices, 
but such cases are exceptions to the rule 
that you will shoot birds, and for this pur- 
pose no weapon compares with the one just 
mentioned. 
His Manual took the student through 
the various disciplines to be mastered by 
the bird lover: choosing ammunition; 
cleaning and loading weapons; learning 
the types and traits of hunting dogs; 
approaching, killing, and recovering 
birds; killing wounded birds; handling 
bleeding birds, mutilations, bloodstains, 
decomposition, and more. 
In his Birds of the Northwest , also 
published in 1874, Coues detailed an 
encounter with the solitary sandpiper: 
Once, coming up to a fence that went past a 
little pool, I saw eight tattlers of this species 
wading about in the shallow water, search- 
ing for food. I pulled trigger on one; the 
others set up a simultaneous outcry, and I 
expected them to fly off, but they presently 
quieted down and began feeding again. 
Without moving from my place, 1 fired 
three times more, killing a single bird at 
each discharge; still no effect upon the 
survivors. Then I climbed the fence and 
stood in full view of the four remaining 
birds; they merely flapped to the further 
side of the pool and stood looking at me, 
nodding away, as if agreed that the whole 
thing was very singular. I stood and deliber- 
ately loaded and fired three times more, 
taking one bird each time; and it was only as 
I was ramming another charge that the sole 
survivor concluded to make off. 
One might wonder if this is how the 
solitary sandpiper got its name. 
Ralph Hoffmann, armed and ready 
Eleanor Hoffmann 
Blood lust, however, was not what 
sent Coues and his colleagues into the 
field with weapons at the ready. Great 
numbers of birds in the hand were re- 
quired to provide the data they were 
compiling on size variation, molts, and 
feeding habits, for example. Identifica- 
tion alone often demanded a corpse; 
only in recent years have sight records 
been given any credence. The dim, low- 
power field glasses of Coues’s day were 
simply not up to fixing on a darting 
warbler in a tangle of branches and 
determining the number of wing bars. 
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