The original birders gave photography a run for its money | Hacker News Reader

The original birders gave photography a run for its money

nytimes.com

55 pointsprismatic45 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stray cats are distributed primarily in the urban population, not in the wild. They kill a bunch of pest birds which we'd otherwise use Ovocontrol or something similar to deal with.

That Nature study is pretty much all Fermi estimates. Since we're trading questions until you start answering, what is your estimate of house cats in the wild.

Fermi estimates are fine, we aren’t trying to track bird deaths out to 6 decimal places. I have no problem saying 30-70 million stray cats and something like ~6 billion calories per day from wildlife.

Stray cats may have higher density near people but so do song birds because humans feed birds they like to look at. Someone buying 10kg of bird feed a month keeps quite a lot of bird biomass alive.

Ah, but humans kill about 7 billion birds a day. So it's a drop in the bucket.

Or so one could reach with Fermi estimates. I think it should be made clear when you link that study that you meant "a back of the envelope calculation says that x birds were killed" etc. etc. rather than implying there was any rigor to it.

Literally making up a number doesn’t support your point, as shown with your wildly incorrect bobcat statement.

And no you can’t reach 7 billion birds a day killed by humans from an honest fermi estimate. People collect information on birds, making wildly incorrect stuff up quickly contradicts actual information which bounds the potential numbers. Feel free to try or actually come up with any actual estimates that support your point.

If it was easy to show this research was wildly inaccurate someone would happily publish a paper showing the errors. You on the other hand are just trying to hand wave I don’t like this therefore it must not be true which is only making you come off as a fool. No, wishing really hard doesn’t make reality bend to your preconceptions.

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...

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.

There are dozens of birds named in a similar way -- Cooper's Hawk, Brewer's Sparrow, Wilson's Warbler, etc, etc.

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...

Not for much longer

https://americanornithology.org/american-ornithological-soci...

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.

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.

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.

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