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A lot of Bird Guides are done by artists (not photographs). Roger Torry Peterson/ Sibley.

I like them, as there is a fair amount of "variation" in birds (age/season) so the guides with photos sometimes are too exact, and they can't highlight all variations. David Sibley's are what I keep in my bag. (He has a birding basics guide thats pretty good too)

https://www.sibleyguides.com/

Roger Torry Peterson (RIP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Tory_Peterson

has an institute named after him https://rtpi.org/about/

I'm not sure if it's mentioned, but to get these illustrations, they killed the birds first. Birders of history did a lot of bird killing, some which lead to species extinction. Which is somewhat ironic.
There are stories of 19th / early-20th century birders hunting and killing the last known examples of particular species. It was a squalid practice, to be sure, but it's a reach to say that collecting (as opposed to the commercial hunting or habitat destruction which had driven those species to the brink) was caused their extinctions.
Some of the older field books had tasting notes for the birds they described.
The original specimen of Rhea pennata (Darwin's Rhea) was cooked and served up as a meal before Darwin realised that it was a new species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_rhea#History_of_the...

Do you have any sources on birders directly causing extinction? I think it’s absolutely wild that someone in that profession would drive a species to extinction just to draw it so I’m curious to read more.
One of the most famous is Rollo Beck and the quelili. Collecting bird species was a very fashionable thing to do, the rarer the more money it brought in. Better to stuff it and exhibit it than to lose it to the forest - this is before conservation was as concept was a thing.

We're losing bird species like crazy - mostly due to lose of habitat (the big reason for the quelili as well). We're never going to learn.

we drive a lot of species extinction because cat is cute.
I agree that cats are cute, but apparently they also make a good casserole

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-24/alice-springs-author-...

  Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop —
  Does a business but I’ve noticed something weird —
  Lately all the neighbors’ cats have disappeared!
- Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd
You should google "far side" fifi chicken
Yeah but we also overestimate that because when you trace all the references back you come to a dubious statistic formed from someone predisposed to the position.
Sure, anything you don’t like must come from biased sources.

It doesn’t trace back to a single statistic, multiple independent studies have looked into it. The often quoted 1 billion birds killed is actually below most scientific estimates of around 1.3 to 4 billion: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

With domestic cats causing ~31% of the ~2.4 billion deaths and strays making up the majority. You can get similar numbers by ignoring domestic cats and simply look at the stray population and roughly estimate how much meat they need to survive and then compare the percentage of bids vs small mammals caught.

It's a classic thing to take anything printed in that style as gospel. Have you actually read it?

You'll have to ask yourself why this works:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380/tables/1

Besides just the fact that the American bobcat's range is all of the continental USA and it can outcompete the domestic cat in the wild for prey easily.

Sort of a natural limitation of science is that any "study" is treated as gospel truth by people not acquainted with the process or the mathematical knowledge required to verify.

I don't even have cats.

Bobcats are wildly outnumbered by stray cats. If anything it’s strays that are out competing them.

Here’s a 2010 estimate of 2,352,276 to 3,571,681 bobcats in the US: https://meridian.allenpress.com/jfwm/article/1/2/169/206731/...

Even low ends of the estimates for US stray cat population is 10x that. The majority of them need to hunt life prey to survive vs handouts, which is mostly small mammals but anyone that’s been around outdoor cats notices the birds are on the menu.

I’ll turn this around what percentage of a wild cats diet do you think are birds? 5% or 15%? You can work out the pounds of meat they need to survive a year and work back to number of birds needed.

we don't need argue with how it work in current environment. there are a lot of people take cat to their new home in history.
The names of some birds still reflect this. For example, the ring-necked duck has a ring around its neck that’s almost impossible to see a on a live bird.
Yes, given how, ahem, life-like the drawings are.
These remind me of the artwork of Ana María Martínez Jaramillo and Natalia Rojas for the board game Wingspan.

https://www.nataliarojasart.com/portfolio

This interview has information about how they create their drawings.

https://www.greenhookgames.com/wingspan-artists/

TIL "Audubon" is some guy's name. In retrospect pretty obvious, but as a kid I always thought it was some word with a very technical bird-related meaning.
There's numerous audobon centers in the US, including one in Audobon Pennsylvania with examples of his work. His works were life sized, so the book that contains the is enormous given that we have some very large birds across the country.
I recently learned that Stellar Jays are actually Stellar's Jays, some guy's name. I always thought Stellar referred their deep blue and black color, like InterStellar space.
Again incorrect spelling - it's "Steller's Jays", not stellar.

And if anyone lives in their habitat and wants to get a few of them around... they love shelled unsalted peanuts! Costco has them pretty cheap.

There are dozens of birds named in a similar way -- Cooper's Hawk, Brewer's Sparrow, Wilson's Warbler, etc, etc.
This will no longer be true next year, as The American Ornithology Society's Diversity & Inclusion Committee plans to rename all these species with "non-colonized, inclusive" names.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84GchnXInb8&t=3903s&ab_chann...

either that or starting next year the american orthonogalogical society will no longer be a reliable resource for bird names
"what's in a name?"

Unfortunately a lot. if they rename stellars jays, for example, it creates a rift in American culture.

No, the rift has been there for centuries, about as long as it's been "America."
ok, english-speaking culture, but only english speakers in the western half of north america.
They would have to rename every bird. Bluebird and Cardinal are named after English colors, the colonizers language.
Names of people.
Ah yes, rename the birds back, that will undo all the bad parts of colonisation.
Also Wingspan is a great board game where you learn all of this. I suspect there may be some players in this thread :)
To be fair, there are birds where the name is the description. Red Wing Black Bird, Blue Jay, snowy egret...
And it's recently become "problematic" to the point where some chapters of the Audubon Society are renaming themselves: https://www.chicagoaudubon.org/blog/2023/10/19/b5fck20t7bwoe...
For the entire "The birds of America" see: https://archive.org/details/birdsofamericafr01audu
Gift Link in case you run into a paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/books/the-original-birder...
Thanks. Eye opening comments!
In Australia we had the Gould league, named in honour of John and Elizabeth Gould.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gould_League

They produced these fantastic art posters for bird identification.

I don't know about photography, but these people sure had an iron grasp on drawing the rest of the fucking owl.