Line of Descent
ByWe all inhabit two communities, the one around us and the one behind us.
For those of us who don’t live in such thoroughly, obsessively documented places as Cape May or Essex County, Massachusetts, it used to be all but impossible to reconstruct our birderly pasts: we knew our mentors, and perhaps the names of their mentors, but beyond that?
Ironically, and happily, the absolutely indiscriminate wealth of historical material available on the internet today makes it possible to go far beyond the vague oral memories most of us have had to be satisfied with. Visit SORA and type in the name of your state or town or local bird club, and you may find that you are tilling long-fertile soil each time you step outside.
When we moved to Bloomfield, New Jersey, last April, I knew that we had ornithological predecessors, and I knew that among them was one Alexander Wilson. What I didn’t know until I started e-sniffing around was that Bloomfield, our undistinguished “starter suburb” between the First Watchung Mountain and the ancient marshes of the Passaic and the Hackensack, had also been a hotbed of birding activity in the 1870s and again, thanks largely to one person, in the first two decades of the last century.
Some bits and pieces of what I’ve found out are “up” today at the BHL Blog. Have a look, and see if there aren’t stories to tell and personalities to get to know from your own historical community.
2 Comments
February 7th, 2013 at 12:49 pm
An interesting question. Your town is very different from Espanola, New Mexico, where there’s nothing in SORA from before the 1970s, except one record of a Red-headed Woodpecker from the 1920s, reported by people who seem to have been passing through. (And the birding here isn’t bad.) I suspect that I’ve met a lot of the pioneers of local birding–some of them now deceased, unfortunately.
February 7th, 2013 at 1:16 pm
Yes, Jerry, that old eastern bias in the history of North American birding is really apparent when you start looking around in stuff like this. SORA, BHL, and the other online reference sites are have surprisingly much local and regional material from MA, NY, and NJ, and virtually nothing from the west.