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condors in Sespe Gorge; nesting petrels 
on the Channel Islands off the Santa 
Barbara coast. He also reports on tennis 
matches (he played with John Galswor- 
thy and beat him 6-4, 1-6, 6-4) and 
planting dates for vegetables, as well as 
some head-butting with William Leon 
Dawson, author of Birds of California. 
There were field trips in his open Ford to 
Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, to 
Arizona, and to the wilderness of Modoc 
County, where he first heard reports of 
the disastrous earthquake that hit Santa 
Barbara in 1925. Writing about one of 
his desert expeditions, Hoffmann noted: 
1 had better luck with my car than I de- 
served. I camped out one night in the desert 
and in the morning found I had a fiat tire. 
My spare was also soft. I took out my pump 
and found a nut was missing and the handle 
wouldn’t stay on. I started to walk to the 
nearest station to get my pump repaired. 
The first car I met was run by a sewing 
machine agent . . . who had two hundred 
nuts of every size and description, one of 
which fitted my pump. Considering the fact 
that I had gone on a desert trip without 
looking to see that my pump was in order, 
we might say that there were two hundred 
and one nuts represented. 
The appearance of Birds of the Pa- 
cific States in 1 927 brought cheers from 
the birding world and huzzahs from 
academe. Florence Merriam Bailey put 
her finger on the quality that to this day 
remains the book’s greatest strength: 
“Your field introductions — putting your 
bird in its setting, as Mr. [John] Bur- 
roughs said — are delightful, admirable, 
a real pleasure to an old field worker.” 
© 1927, 1955. Houghton Mifflin Co. 
Solitary sandpiper from Hoffmann’s 
Birds of the Pacific States 
To assert as some old-time birders do 
that Hoffmann’s Birds of the Pacific 
States is the finest American field guide 
ever written may be to overstate the 
case. What is unarguable, however, is 
Hoffmann’s ability to forecast with near 
prescience the exact circumstances — 
region, habitat, season, feeding behav- 
ior, call notes, song, idiosyncrasies — 
under which birders are apt to encoun- 
ter each of the subjects they profile. 
Always the teacher, he takes us by the 
hand to the edge of a marsh, to a 
streamside willow thicket or an alpine 
meadow, picks out his bird, brings it into 
focus, and tells us what to look and listen 
for. Nobody before or since has done 
this quite as well. In this respect, Birds 
of the Pacific States is a classic. 
With the publication of his guide in 
1927, Hoffmann had five years remain- 
ing to him before his tragic, but some- 
how fitting, death. The Birds behind 
him, he was now absorbed in botany, 
particularly the buckwheats. He had 
made frequent trips to the Channel Is- 
lands in search of them, and when the 
opportunity came to go to San Miguel 
Island on July 21, 1932, he enthusiasti- 
cally took it. Arriving at the island, 
Hoffmann decided to collect some 
buckwheat specimens growing on a 
nearby cliff before joining his compan- 
ions. He never appeared. A search was 
begun in heavy fog, and eight hours 
later, some time after nightfall, his 
crumpled body was found at the foot of 
an almost perpendicular cliff. He had 
evidently tried to climb after his buck- 
wheat specimen, using his trowel for 
support, and the handle had snapped 
off. It was found beside the body. 
Hoffmann is remembered today in 
Santa Barbara, particularly by those 
connected with the museum. A plaque 
in the Hoffmann Loggia memorializes 
him as “a student of flowers and birds 
who welcomed the children and made 
the museum a center of inspiration for 
all lovers of life and beauty.” 
But he is forgotten elsewhere. Birds 
of the Pacific States remained in print 
for fifty years but is now unavailable. As 
Joseph Hickey, a wildlife ecologist and 
longtime birder, recently observed, “In 
looking over Hoffmann’s books, one is 
impressed with the fact that he must 
have been a terrific field man. One feels 
embarrassed that the obituary in The 
Auk didn’t even spell his name right.” 
Harold Swanton, a retired writer for 
radio, television, and the movies, has 
been a bird watcher for fifty-three 
years. 
30 
