Until the eight-power, high-illumina- 
tion prism binocular became available 
after the turn of the century, the serious 
bird student had to take John Bur- 
roughs’s advice: “Don’t ogle it through a 
glass! Shoot it!” Amateurs and profes- 
sionals alike shot birds and took them 
home to check tibia length and bill 
color, axillars, secondaries, and under- 
tail coverts against descriptions in the 
works of Robert Ridgway, Thomas Nut- 
tall, or Coues. Books of the nineteenth 
century document habits, mannerisms, 
migration dates, and particularly nests 
and eggs (oology was one of the passions 
of the day) in great detail, but field 
marks were mentioned sketchily if at all. 
There was little point in describing 
flight patterns and call notes when more 
often than not the reader would have the 
bird in hand. Sophisticated field identi- 
fication points — nuances in color, 
feather edging, and subtle differences in 
call notes and songs that today enable a 
good field birder to identify confusing 
species — were either unknown or simply 
unmentioned in the literature. Although 
engravings would have been adequate to 
illustrate important field marks, color 
printing was nonexistent and, aside from 
Audubon, there were few fine bird art- 
ists until Louis Agassiz Fuertes came 
along toward the end of the century. For 
all these reasons, the idea of a field 
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guide that would deal exclusively with 
sight identification developed slowly. 
Forty years before Coues’s Manual 
appeared, for example, Nuttall, one of 
the founding fathers of American orni- 
thology, provided a description of the 
solitary sandpiper that is of little use to 
an observer in the field. 
Upper parts brownish olive, spotted and 
streaked with white; wings and tail dusky, 
outer tail feathers white with dark bars; 
underparts white, breast and sides with 
dark markings. In the winter the plumage 
of the upper parts is dark ash, and the 
markings are less distinct. 
The barred outer tail feathers, an 
important field mark, are mentioned but 
not emphasized. Nuttall grouped the 
solitary with the green sandpiper of Eu- 
rope, although they are different species 
distinguishable in the field; he also 
made no attempt to separate the solitary 
from such similar birds as the spotted 
sandpiper and the lesser yellowlegs. The 
engraving accompanying the essay is of 
little help. Following the description is a 
page and a half of text dealing with nest 
and eggs, idiosyncrasies, and feeding 
habits. 
Frank M. Chapman’s Handbook of 
Birds of Eastern North America ap- 
peared in 1895 and remained a standard 
reference work for three decades. Pub- 
lished in a pocket-size format, the book 
provided detailed descriptions and syl- 
labicated call notes in some species, but 
it was still really more for the bird in the 
hand than in the bush. Chapman evi- 
dently recognized its shortcomings. In 
the preface to his 1903 Color Key to 
North American Birds, illustrated by 
Chester A. Reed, he wrote: 
To learn to call a bird by its right name is 
the first step in the study of ornithology. . . . 
From the scientific point of view there is but 
one satisfactory way to identify a bird. A 
specimen of it should be in hand . . . [but] 
we cannot place a gun in the hands of these 
thousands of bird lovers whom we are 
yearly developing. 
In some respects, however, Chap- 
man’s laudable objective of simplifying 
things added to the confusion. Perching 
birds, for example, were grouped, not by 
relationship, but by color: the meadow- 
lark is cheek by jowl with the evening 
grosbeak, the yellow-headed blackbird 
with assorted warblers. The colors su- 
perimposed on engraved sketches were 
not entirely successful; descriptions 
were short and telegraphic. 
Florence Merriam Bailey’s 1902 
Handbook of Birds of the Western 
United States was another turn of the 
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