With this lovely and informative volume, Alan Feduccia preserves the pathbreaking work of Mark Catesby, the English naturalist and illustrator who founded natural history and bird art in America. First published by UNC Press in 1985, the book features all

What draws us to the beauty of a peacock, the flight of an eagle, or the song of a nightingale? Why are birds so significant in our lives and our sense of the world? And what do our ways of thinking about and experiencing birds tell us about ourselves? Birdscapes is a unique meditation on the variety of human responses to birds, from antiquity to today, and from casual observers to the globe-trotting "twitchers" who sometimes risk life, limb, and marriages simply to add new species to their "life lists." Drawing extensively on literature, history, philosophy, and science, Jeremy Mynott puts his own experiences as a birdwatcher in a rich cultural context. His sources range from the familiar--Thoreau, Keats, Darwin, and Audubon--to the unexpected--Benjamin Franklin, Giacomo Puccini, Oscar Wilde, and Monty Python. Just as unusual are the extensive illustrations, which explore our perceptions and representations of birds through images such as national emblems, women's hats, professional sports logos, and a Christmas biscuit tin, as well as classics of bird art. Each chapter takes up a new theme--from rarity, beauty, and sound to conservation, naming, and symbolism--and is set in a new place, as Mynott travels from his "home patch" in Suffolk, England, to his "away patch" in New York City's Central Park, as well as to Russia, Australia, and Greece. Conversational, playful, and witty, Birdscapes gently leads us to reflect on large questions about our relation to birds and the natural world. It encourages birders to see their pursuits in a broader human context--and it shows nonbirders what they may be missing.

In 1712, English naturalist Mark Catesby (1683–1749) crossed the Atlantic to Virginia. After a seven-year stay, he returned to England with paintings of plants and animals he had studied. They sufficiently impressed other naturalists that in 1722 several Fellows of the Royal Society sponsored his return to North America. There Catesby cataloged the flora and fauna of the Carolinas and the Bahamas by gathering seeds and specimens, compiling notes, and making watercolor sketches. Going home to England after five years, he began the twenty-year task of writing, etching, and publishing his monumental The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Mark Catesby was a man of exceptional courage and determination combined with insatiable curiosity and multiple talents. Nevertheless no portrait of him is known. The international contributors to this volume review Catesby’s biography alongside the historical and scientific significance of his work. Ultimately, this lavishly illustrated volume advances knowledge of Catesby’s explorations, collections, artwork, and publications in order to reassess his importance within the pantheon of early naturalists.

After his 1728 Virginia-North Carolina boundary expedition, Virginia planter and politician William Byrd II composed two very different accounts of his adventures. The Secret History of the Line was written for private circulation, offering tales of scandalous behavior and political misconduct, peppered with rakish humor and personal satire. The History of the Dividing Line, continually revised by Byrd for decades after the expedition, was intended for the London literary market, though not published in his lifetime. Collating all extant manuscripts, Kevin Joel Berland's landmark scholarly edition of these two histories provides wide-ranging historical and cultural contexts for both, helping to recreate the social and intellectual ethos of Byrd and his time. Byrd enriched his narratives with material appropriated from earlier authors, many of whose works were in his library--the most extensive in the American colonies. Berland identifies for the first time many of Byrd's sources and raises the question: how reliable are histories that build silently upon antecedent texts and present borrowed material as firsthand testimony? In his analysis, Berland demonstrates the need for a new category to assess early modern history writing: the hybrid, accretional narrative.

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was the first major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil, Catesby's Natural History exerted an important, though often overlooked, influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the eighteenth century. Inspired by a major traveling exhibition of Catesby's watercolor drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, this collection of interdisciplinary essays considers Catesby's endeavors as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned_particularly as those interests related to the British colonial enterprise. The contributors are David R. Brigham, Joyce E. Chaplin, Mark Laird, Amy R. W. Meyers, Therese O'Malley, and Margaret Beck Pritchard. The contributors: David R. Brigham (Worcester Art Museum) Joyce E. Chaplin (Vanderbilt University) Mark Laird (University of Toronto) Amy R. W. Meyers (Huntington Library & Art Collections) Therese O'Malley (National Gallery of Art) Margaret Beck Pritchard (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

"Ecological questions are at the center of many of the most important decisions faced by humanity. Roots of Ecology documents the deep ancestry of this enormously important science from the early ideas of Herodotus, Plato, and Pliny; up through those of Linnaeus and Dawin, to those that inspired Ernst Haeckel's mid-nineteenth-century neologism ecology. Based on a long-running series of regularly published columns, this important work gathers a vast literature that illustrates the development of the ecological concepts, environmental ideas, and creative reasoning that have led to our modern view of ecology. Roots of Ecology should be on every ecologist's shelf."--Back cover.

Host to a large and diverse bird population as well as a long human history, Virginia is arguably the birthplace of ornithology in North America. David W. Johnston's History of Ornithology in Virginia, the result of over a decade of research, is the first book to address this fascinating element of the state's natural history. Tertiary-era fossils show that birds inhabited Virginia as early as 65 million years ago. Their first human observers were the region's many Indian tribes and, later, colonists on Roanoke Island and in Jamestown. Explorers pushing westward contributed further to the development of a conception of birds that was distinctively American. By the 1900s planter-farmers, naturalists, and government employees had amassed bird records from the Barrier Islands and the Dismal Swamp to the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. The modern era saw the emergence of ornithological organizations and game laws, as well as increasingly advanced studies of bird distribution, migration pathways, and breeding biology. Johnston shows us how ornithology in Virginia evolved from observations of wondrous creatures to a sophisticated science recognizing some 435 avian species. David W. Johnston taught ornithology at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station for nearly two decades and has edited numerous ecological studies as well as the Journal of Field Ornithology and Ornithological Monographs.

Over the past four centuries botanists and gardeners in the British Isles have gathered, maintained and propagated many varying species of plants. Their work has been documented in innumerable books and articles which are often difficult to trace. The Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists represents a time-saving reference source for those who wish to discover more about the lives and achievements of the horticulturalists listed. The dictionary's utility comes not only from indicating the major publications of the named authors, but also the location of their herbaria and manuscripts.; The previous 1977 edition of the Dictionary has for many years been a much used source of information for botanists, botanic artists and archivists. In this revised edition the scope has been expanded to include among its 13,000 entries flower painters in addition to botanical artists over 1400 entries and, for the first time, garden designers.; Finally the Dictionary should have international appeal since so many botanists and gardeners worked on collective plants overseas, in particular in North America and the British Commonwealth.; Each entry gives, wherever possible, details of dates and places of birth and death, educational qualifications, professional posts, honours and awards, publications, location of plant collections, manuscripts, drawings and portraits. Its main function, however, is to provide further biographical references to books and periodicals. Comprehensive classified indices facilitate access by professions and activities, countries, and plant interests.

One of the surest harbingers of spring is the return of Purple Martins to the houses that people put up across the United States to attract these companionable birds. The bustle of courting, rearing nestlings, and fledging young martins fills the summer months, until approaching autumn lures the martins to their winter range in South America. Then human landlords refurbish their martin houses and wait for another round of this much-anticipated yearly cycle. Robin Doughty and Rob Fergus here present a concise natural history of the bird and its centuries-long companionship with people. They discuss the martin's scientific classification and names, its migration and range, and its family life. They relate stories of how Native Americans and European colonists attracted Purple Martins and how Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped martins survive the loss of natural nesting sites by providing houses for them.