Remember the mocking charge once leveled at the bookish young?
“I bet you read the dictionary!”
Well, maybe not read exactly, but for many of us, our earliest experiences with literacy did in fact include a good browse through the book of words, each entry suggesting another as time slips past. I still do it, if truth be told, but I’ve branched out over the years, letting association and chance lead me through lists and catalogues and inventories of all sorts.
Including, of course, bird lists.
James Graham Cooper spent July 3 and July 4, 1857, in the vicinity of Shawnee Mission, Kansas. I don’t have convenient access to Cooper’s diaries, or to the published biography, or, for some inscrutable e-reason, even to the classic Ibis article about the “father of Pacific coast ornithology.” But I do have — and so do you — Spencer Baird’s Birds of 1858. And that fine book is full of lists, lists just evocative enough to let us speculate about what Cooper experienced on his way west.
Did the eastern kingbird he shot dance around his head on quivering wingbeats? Were the male western meadowlark and the two male grasshopper sparrows still singing in their tallgrass fastnesses, or had the exertions of parental care pretty much silenced them by early July? Were the two dickcissels — a male and a female — Cooper sent back to Washington an ill-fated pair, or did he widow the mate of each? And why did he take only one juvenile northern rough-winged swallow? Were its siblings too fast, too far, too cute to shoot?
Taken together, those records, none of them more than a name and a date in a dry, factual table, conjure memories of early mornings on the prairie, the birds of open country busy singing and feeding and caring for their young while merely human life goes on around them.
Try it yourself. Trace a place or a naturalist through the lists in Baird or any other sober-sided ornithological compilation, and see what stories you can come up with. It’s even better than reading the dictionary.
