The Hawkeye Ornithologist and Oologist. Vol. 1. No. 4 April 1888

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.7
Word count
63K words
Chapters
7

Tags

Other Natural Sciences Amateur ScienceNaturalist ObservationEcological ResearchScience JournalNature ObservationOologyField NotesPopular Science Magazine19th CenturyAmerican Natural History

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Hawkeye Ornithologist and Oologist. Vol. 1. No. 4 April 1888 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: QL: Science: Zoology, Release Date: Feb 24, 2019

Editor's review

Published in April 1888, this is Volume 1, No. 4 of The Hawkeye Ornithologist and Oologist, a valuable digital reproduction of an early ornithological periodical. Written from the perspective of naturalist observers, it records the field practices of birdwatchers and egg collectors of the period—observation, collection, and record-keeping—and includes species observation notes, local bird lists, and reader correspondence. Its value lies not in systematic modern ornithological theory but in presenting the real ecology of late-19th-century North American amateur natural history: terminological habits, recording methods, observational priorities, and human-bird interactions. For those studying the history of science, the spread of natural history, or early nature writing, it is vivid primary material. Read it as a historical source, not a reference book, and note the distance between its observations and today's revised taxonomy and conservation views. Best read slowly with annotations in a quiet setting, or as supplementary reading for nature-writing or history-of-science courses.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and section notes first to understand the issue's structure, then selectively close-read the observation notes.
  2. Compare the text with modern bird taxonomy and conservation views, marking historical differences and terminological changes.
  3. Treat the reader correspondence and local lists as historical excerpts and build your own notes on natural history sources.
  4. If the English is difficult, read summary-style passages first, then return to detailed descriptions and terminology.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this periodical suitable for learning modern bird identification? No. It is a late-19th-century amateur natural history periodical that records the observation habits and taxonomic understanding of its time, and it differs clearly from modern bird identification guides in methods, terminology, and classification. It is better read as a historical source for the history of science and natural history than as a tool for identifying bird species.
Why is this e-book not illustrated? The information indicates that this is an electronic text released by Project Gutenberg, a public-domain book project centered on text transcription. The original periodical may have contained illustrations, but the electronic edition is primarily textual and may not retain the plates. Readers should focus on the written records and section content and should not expect a visual presentation like a field guide.
What background is needed to read this old English periodical? It requires intermediate or higher English reading ability and some patience with 19th-century natural history prose. The species names, collecting terminology, and correspondence formats carry the marks of their era, so readers should ideally use a dictionary or modern ornithological references for comparison; otherwise they may get stuck on details.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.