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Searching & Navigating the Bird Archive

Birding Guides + Data Sources

C19

C19 data on the birds’ occurrence, arrival, and departure dates is drawn principally from H. L. Clark’s The Birds of Amherst &Vicinity, including nearly the whole of Hampshire County (1887), originally published in Amherst, Mass., by J. E. Williams and now available via the HathiTrust [1]. Two additional sources—Ebenezer Emmons’s Birds of Massachusetts (1833), originally published in Dr. Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology, Minerology, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts”, pp. 528-51, and J. A. Allen’s “Catalogue of the Birds Found at Springfield, Mass., with Notes on their Migrations, Habits, & c., together with a list of those birds found in the State not yet observed at Springfield”, originally published in the Proceedings of the Essex Institute at Salem, Vol. IV, No. 2, September 1864 (HathiTrust) have, on occasion, helped us to partly fill in the record [2]. 

Together these lists suggest the boundaries of the 19th-century’s formal knowledge of Amherst’s and Western Massachusetts’s birds. Now cultural artifacts as much scientific records, they also bear witness to the habits of mind of the observers who made them in an era when Nature was still the Book of Nature. Emmons’s, Allen’s, and Clark’s often telegraphic notes marking, among other things, the first sightings of a bird in spring—“Bobolink. 4 April. Miss Morse” (Clark 1887)—and the last glimpses of it in autumn leaving for its wintering range—“Passes south in November” (Clark 1887)—offer tiny archives of feeling.

C20

By the 20th century, ornithology had evolved into a rigorous scientific discipline, a development reflected in the increasing breadth and depth of available data as well as in changes in the ways data was gathered and reported. While many fine sources were now available to us, we selected as our principal source of data Aaron Clark Bagg and Samuel Atkins Eliot Jr.’s 1937 Birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts originally published in Northampton, Mass., by The Hampshire Bookshop and available through the HathiTrust for several reasons. Unfolding over 800 pages and including entries on 268 species, this work offers a deep ornithological history of the region composed via the collation of more than a hundred years of observations recorded by earlier natural historians. To this historical information, they add their own, thus inscribing themselves into the record of a world still balanced between subjectivity and empiricism: “Jan. 16, 1931, [a snowy owl] was sighted at sundown flying from Hadley Bridge southward: a huge, white bird flapping silently and low over the still white glistening fields against the purple of Mt. Holyoke in the fast-falling winter twilight” (314). First printed when the Passenger Pigeon Clark had called “common near Amherst” in the spring of 1888 had been extinct for almost a quarter century but also a full quarter century before the wide-spread cultural imagination of a silent spring would take hold, this major work is also a transitional work between two centuries that now seem lightyears apart.

Since Bagg and Eliot’s work is regional rather than local and includes many more birds than those inhabiting or passing through Amherst, we have used David Fischer’s “Annotated List of 234 Amherst Birds,” in Peter Westover’s Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds published by The Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977 to determine the C20 birds represented.

C21

In place of the small, rare epiphanies that were the typical rewards of thousands of hours of solitary fieldwork by 19th- and early  20th-century natural historians and ornithologists, the 21st century is witness to and recipient of vast datasets collected by radar networks continually scanning the skies for birds. [3] For 21st-century data, we too have cast our mist-net into the virtual environment, sifting resources including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home) and Birds of the World (https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home) as well as regional sources including The Massachusetts Avian Records Committee State List , the Mass Audubon Breeding Bird Atlas 1 Species Accounts, and  Wayne R. Petersen and Brian E. Small’s Field Guide to Birds of Massachusetts, published by Scott & Nix, Inc., 2017.

We begin, however, with small, local data, drawing again on David Fischer’s “Annotated List of 234 Amherst Birds,” in Peter Westover’s Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds (Amherst: Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977) and, since this list is still a (late) C20 list, on the Amherst College Bird Survey 2008, to determine the boundaries of the list. This “small” data—what we call “sparrow data”—also reveals is a summons to us to to us a new and urgent need to count and care for the least of things, for birds and poems. [4]

Bird-Sound Sources

The website https://xeno-canto.org/, created in 2005 by Bob Planque and William-Pier Vellinga, and administrated by the Netherlands-based Xeno-canto foundation (Stichting Xeno-canto voor natuurgeluiden), is the primary source of the sound and sonogram files used in Dickinson’s Birds. Xeno-canto is committed to education, conservation, and science, and their recordings are shared under various Creative Commons licenses that generally allow distribution provided recordists are credited and provided no commercial proceeds are sought. We are deeply grateful to XenoCanto for their mission and generous dissemination of bird sounds.