Daniel recommends. If I like it, recommend to Eloise to tell Pima to buy it (in paper).

Birding has become quite the phenomenon in America, especially for people of certain generations, and all the more so during and since the pandemic. And one of the great trials involved with getting into birding is all the bird species.

Some bird species names make sense. The Ring-billed Gull has a ring around its bill. The California Scrub-Jay is a member of the jay family which favors the scrub land of California. Acorn Woodpeckers love stashing acorns everywhere. But then you have the Lewis’ Woodpecker, the Stellar’s Jay, and many other similar names which clearly encode some kind of history.

And it’s that history which has come under a lot of discussion and dispute these days. Kenn Kaufman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness (galley received as part of early review program) tells the history of the development of American ornithology, and how a lot of said birds obtained their current appellations.

The book’s catalyst involved the author’s fascination with John James Audubon’s paintings preserved in his The Birds of America, which have been recognized for some time as some of the best ever made. But Audubon did not actually draw up every species in North America, not even every species in the American east. Thus the author intended to draw what Audubon did not and detailed the story of how he had missed them.

That story ends up becoming the story of ornithology in general and the development of the understanding of bird life in North America. The author described the Linnean system and how it developed, along with its competitors. The Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century quite optimistically imagined they could analyze and organize all of life, and the Linnean system is its result.

The story of understanding American birds had many characters, of whom Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon would prove among the most significant. Wilson did a lot more of the work, but ultimately Audubon would become known as the greatest, mostly because of the quality of his work.

Today we have the benefit of all the work which has been done over the past few hundred years to make sense of the birds of North America. Yet in this book we see all the frustrations and misdirections which attended to the process. They could tell some species were quite similar to those from Europe; yet many others proved quite different. Figuring that out would prove challenging. Many American birds look different at different seasons; sometimes they would be mistaken for different species. People did not understand American bird migrations very well (to this day we still are learning more), compounding the difficulty.

And, of course, on top of that, was the intense competitive spirit of Wilson and Audubon in their quest to find and identify new species of birds, and especially Audubon.

Thus throughout the author describes the life and work of Audubon, somewhat of Wilson and some of the other major early American ornithologists, and their adventures and misadventures. The author also provides interludes about illustrating and many of the aspects which go into it.

The author does well at recognizing what was done and many of its more problematic aspects. The killing of so many birds was a feature of the age. And the naming after themselves and people in their association.

The naming has become quite the issue among modern birders; the goal has been advanced to re-name in English all birds which were given names involving people (i.e. the Lewis’ Woodpecker, Stellar’s Jay, Woodhouse’s Jay, Brandt’s Comorant, Baird’s Sandpiper, and many others).

This has proven controversial, of course, and many protest and ask about the need. But Kaufman has done well to show how recent a lot of these names are, and how names were often adapted and changed over time. This book should give some comfort to those who tend to be more enamored with modern names and encouragement in the work to provide names which better describe the birds rather than the intense competition to “find” and name them.

This is a great history of the author’s passion about birds, how American birding has come to be as it is, and the stories of discovery and further exploration. A great resource for those interested in birding. ( )