"Stray feathers. Journal of ornithology for India and its dependencies"
-
This keeps coming up in the search results when I try to get corroboration for ornithology words such as old-fashioned spellings of place names... it's from pretty much the same years as the current ledger page. https://archive.org/stream/strayfeathersjou61878hume/strayfeathersjou61878hume_djvu.txt The introduction makes for interesting reading, but uncomfortable; I feel like a colonial invader, pillager and exploiter by proxy. For example:
Those and those only who have
collected personally on a large scale in a warm climate, and in wild, out-of-the-way
localities, where none of the commonest necessaries of European life are available, can
appreciate the perseverance and endurance that the prompt and punctual record of
such particulars [describing soft parts of specimens] involves in the case of a man who has been already fagging through
the jungle for 8 or 10 hours, and may have to sit up half the night to get the bodies
out of his specimens before they become putrid.But, if the editor's friend Mr. Davison had not shot his way through such large numbers of the avifauna of the far east, we wouldn't be working on this data now. Hopefully there'll be some conservation outcomes.
Anyway, I thought the narrative, and the glimpse into such a different world and mindset, was interesting.
Posted
