Given the overwhelming popularity and extraordinary usefulness of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds web page, it isn’t surprising at all that the content of it would eventually be employed for the creation of a printed field guide.
Given the overwhelming popularity and extraordinary usefulness of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds web page, it isn’t surprising at all that the content of it would eventually be employed for the creation of a printed field guide.
As it’s now past the ides of January, I’ve recently been noticing quite a lot of snowdrops – in my Instagram feed. While it is possible to find them in my home area of northwest Oregon, it is really my friends in the United Kingdom who are best attuned to their appearance each year.
Down the road from our home is a grove of Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees. Native to the area, “Doug Firs” are easily found in most any field guide to trees that encompasses a geographic range in which northwest Oregon is included. However at the edge of this little grove is another tree – deciduous and smaller – that long perplexed me. Nothing in guide after guide to which I turned for guidance seemed to have anything quite like it depicted.
In 1819, the renowned Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray walked from Aberdeen, Scotland to London, England in order to visit the natural history collection at the British Museum. If the modern M6 had been available to him, this would be a distance of 548 miles – one way. However because Mr. MacGillivray took a more scenic route that included Ben Nevis, the distance he walked totaled 837 miles; a distance he covered in approximately eight weeks.