First birdwatching field guide

First published in 1889, Birds Through an Opera-Glass (The Chautauqua Press) was a compilation of articles penned by Florence A Merriam (USA), one of the earliest activists for bird conservation and sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Ornithology". Although this book represented birds only by fairly crude line drawings, it is the first guidebook to focus on the pleasure to be derived from the activity of watching and identifying birds in their natural habitat without disturbing them (in this case using opera glasses as a visual aid), rather than previous books that centred on how to hunt them.

Birds Through an Opera-Glass is distinguished by Merriam's florid but charming descriptions, e.g., a crow is described as “a very Shakespeare among birds,” and the ruby-throated hummingbird as a “winged spirit of color.”

Merriam's guide was superseded by the much more successful Bird Guide: Land Birds East of the Rockies by Chester Reed, first published in 1906. Often referred to as the first true field guide to birds, this guide was pocket-sized and contained Reed’s quite accurate colour paintings of birds.

Reed’s guide was the inspiration for Roger Tory Peterson’s landmark 1934 publication of A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, which is widely credited as launching birdwatching as a popular hobby.

Of course, there are many books about birds published earlier than 1889, but they were not necessarily suited to being used as a portable guide for bird identification while out in the field. One of the most famous among these is the huge illustrated tome Birds of America (1827–38) American ornithologist John James Audubon, which became the most expensive natural-history book ever when one copy sold for £7.3 m ($11.5 m) at Sotheby's auction house in London, UK, on 7 December 2010.