INTRODUCTION

IN 1887 a worried mother from Alameda, California, wrote to seek advice from Robert Ridgway, curator of birds at the U.S. National Museum. It seems that her twenty-year-old son, Henry Reed Taylor, was intent on pursuing a career in ornithology. Was there any future in this vocation? she wondered. Unfortunately, Ridgway, one of only a few paid ornithologists in America at the time, could offer little encouragement for this anxious mother and her determined young son:

I would say that if one is without the means of living independently of the study of natural history (in any of its branches), he stands a very poor chance indeed of deriving the greatest benefit from its study. It is very necessary, in fact, to have some regular business, profession, or other occupation which shall supply the means of defraying one’s expenses. The study of natural history affords those whose tastes run in that direction a very agreeable and instructive recreation, and the means of employing pleasantly and profitably hours of enforced idleness which might otherwise be passed in far more harmful ways. As a means of livelihood, however, it must, in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, prove a complete failure, success being ... a question not only of exceptional ability, but also of exceptional circumstance.¹

A voracious collector of birds’ eggs and nests, Taylor was one of the thousands of Americans who began pursuing some form of natural history in the second half of the nineteenth century.² As industrialization, urbanization, and economic expansion increasingly reshaped the nation’s landscape, growing numbers of enthusiasts began collecting natural objects and observing animals in their natural surroundings. For these middle- and upper-class Americans, regular forays into fields and forests fulfilled a vague but real longing to regain contact with a natural world that modern civilization seemed bent on destroying.

As Ridgway’s reply to Taylor hinted, advocates of collecting promised numerous other benefits for those who embraced the activity: recreation, exercise, adventure, and a sense of accomplishment as collectors filled their homes with a bewildering array of beautiful objects, ranging from fossils and ferns to butterflies and birds. Local natural history societies, popular periodicals, and expansive correspondence networks offered encouragement and advice for aspiring collectors, while providing regular avenues for specimen exchange. Heightened public interest in natural history also spawned local and national businesses that sought to capitalize on collectors’ apparently insatiable appetite for information, supplies, and specimens.

By the century’s end, observation of wildlife—especially in the form of birdwatching—had also come into vogue. Soon tens of thousands of Americans were joining Audubon societies, purchasing new, easy-to-use field guides, and keeping systematic records of the species they encountered in the wild. By the early twentieth century, interest in wildlife had become so widespread that even mass-circulation periodicals provided regular coverage of seemingly esoteric scientific controversies—like the question of whether animals could reason and the debate over whether their coloration was adaptive.³

In the midst of this explosion of popular interest in natural history, scientific ornithologists in the United States and Canada struggled to forge a discipline and profession.⁴ Initially the common goal around which this small, dedicated group of experts sought to focus was the production of an exhaustive inventory of North American bird forms. The founding of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) in 1883 marked one in a series of milestones in the ongoing campaign to gain legitimacy for their emerging discipline. As Ridgway’s letter suggested, however, expanding occupational opportunity in ornithology proved more elusive.

Of course, ornithologists were not the only scientists striving to consolidate their discipline into a profession. Although the process of professionalization in science occurred at varying rates across different specialties and nations, the general trend was unmistakable. Throughout the nineteenth century, gentlemanly amateurs—men of wealth, leisure, and social standing who had long dominated the practice of science—slowly but steadily lost ground to full-time paid specialists.⁵ As historian of science Everett Mendelsohn observed more than three decades ago, professionalization represented a “second scientific revolution,” a profound change in the structure and practice of science every bit as fundamental as its more widely appreciated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessor.⁶

Historians and sociologists have long struggled to understand how certain occupations have achieved the prestige, authority, and autonomy associated with modern professions and even to define the term “profession” itself. Until recently, two basic approaches have dominated this “thankless task.”⁷ In the first—the so-called trait approach—researchers have constructed checklists of attributes common to fields conventionally recognized as professions, with medicine, law, and the ministry usually taken as paradigmatic examples.⁸ A profession, according to this school of thought, is a full-time occupation defined by some combination of the following characteristics: possession of an abstract and systematic body of knowledge that commands authority; formal educational requirements; routine (often state-sanctioned) procedures for certifying and licensing practitioners; associations to enforce standards, honor achievement, and exert control within the field; and a general orientation toward public service.⁹

Since the 1960s many historians and sociologists have criticized the trait approach as static, ahistorical, and naive. According to proponents of the alternative “power” approach, previous scholars had generally failed to grasp the crucial difference between the image of competency, altruism, and service that professionals projected before the public and the (less flattering) reality of their ongoing quest to maintain status, privilege, and monopolistic domination in their field.¹⁰ Although proponents of the trait and power approaches disagree on many points, both have stressed the establishment of institutionally sanctioned boundaries between experts and their potential rivals as central to the process of professionalization.

While many scholars examining the development of scientific professions have adopted one of these two basic frameworks, others have begun to highlight their shortcomings.¹¹ For example, in a seminal article published in the mid-1970s, historian of science Nathan Reingold offered a serious challenge to the rigid amateur-professional dichotomy that had long plagued the literature on professionalization.¹² He was also among the first to appreciate that definitions derived from professions as currently construed fail to map neatly onto past circumstances. Reingold questioned whether advanced degrees, formal certification procedures, and employment opportunities were appropriate criteria for delineating the social dynamics of nineteenth-century scientific communities at a time when, in the words of Howard Miller, there was “no well-defined recognized niche in the occupational structure for a man who devoted his life to scientific research.”¹³ Accomplishment and motivation, Reingold argued, are much more useful for reconstructing relationships within those earlier communities.¹⁴

In a long series of publications that began appearing at about the same time as Reingold’s article, the sociologist Robert A. Stebbins further blurred the traditional professional-amateur distinction.¹⁵ As a participant-observer of several contemporary communities in science, art, sport, and entertainment, Stebbins discovered numerous well-established professions that continued to interact with avocational practitioners, often in significant ways. Stebbins argued that the diverse practitioners within a given field are best understood as interconnected and interdependent components of what he called a “professional-amateur-public system.”

In the last twenty years scholars have explored many scientific fields—astronomy, botany, archaeology, meteorology, entomology, and others—that seem to support Reingold and Stebbins’s insights.¹⁶ Some scientific specialties—those demanding a particularly challenging level of technical expertise or access to expensive and sophisticated equipment—effectively kept amateurs at bay. But others, especially where crucial data was relatively easy to record yet dispersed across vast geographic (or, in the case of astronomy, celestial) expanses, remained open to continued amateur participation.

Ornithology provides a classic example of an inclusive scientific field.¹⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, it shared many attributes that scholars have identified as key to the process of professionalization. It was based on a systematized body of abstract knowledge and—through the AOU—quickly established institutionalized mechanisms for certifying its practitioners. There were even a handful of jobs available to ornithologists, primarily as curators in the large urban natural history museums established during this period. Yet scientific ornithologists continued to depend on a variety of collectors, taxidermists, sport hunters, and others to supply the specimens and observations needed to conduct their research. By 1905 Frank Chapman, a curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, noted that “in no other branch [of science] are the professionals so outnumbered by the amateurs; and this fact it seems to us, should be constantly held in mind in any consideration of ornithological interests.”¹⁸ Even after graduate training became the norm and employment prospects began to brighten in the 1920s and 1930s, scientific ornithologists remained firmly tied to a larger community of variously motivated bird enthusiasts who provided research data, funding, and a supply of future scientists.

Some scientists tolerated a continuing amateur presence because of the useful data that carefully monitored avocational ornithologists might contribute. The Smithsonian ornithologist and herpetologist Leonhard Stejneger seemed to have this strongly hierarchical model of scientific cooperation in mind when he declared in 1905 that “The amateur’s proper field is in the gathering of facts, the professional’s is to apply them.”¹⁹ But others appreciated the more fundamental contributions that dedicated amateurs were capable of making. By the 1970s the renowned ornithologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr was still celebrating the “splendid work” that amateurs were doing in his field.²⁰

The case of ornithology confirms other recent studies showing that a preoccupation with the process of professionalization has obscured a crucial social reality in the development of many scientific fields: namely, that even as scientists sought to establish disciplines and professions, they often remained firmly bound to a variety of amateur enthusiasts. Professional scientists, amateur practitioners—even technicians, patrons, specimen suppliers, administrators, and others—were (and are) important parts of what historians and sociologists have recently begun to conceptualize as “communities,” “social worlds,” “networks,” and “professional-amateur-public systems.”²¹ Each of these characterizations has slightly different connotations, but they all point to essentially the same thing: a recognition of the fundamental diversity of the scientific enterprise.

That is not to suggest that scientific communities were egalitarian or free from friction. In the case of ornithology, scientists struggled long and hard to establish standards, expand career opportunities, control research, and achieve other goals consistent with traditional notions of professionalization. The account that follows makes clear, however, that their success at implementing their professional agenda remained partial at best. Certainly the well-documented resistance mounted by those who resented scientists’ attempts to control the field played a role in that failure. However, I suspect that the scientists themselves also contributed. Throughout the period covered by this study, scientific ornithologists remained ambivalent about continued public interest in their field. On the one hand, they clearly worried about issues like status and prestige, autonomy and authority. On the other, they seemed reluctant to cut themselves off entirely from the Henry Taylors of the world. Ridgway’s letter and countless others like it in archives across North America are testimony to scientific ornithologists’ continuing connection with bird enthusiasts of all kinds.

This social history of American ornithology focuses on the relationship between scientific ornithologists committed to the production of technical knowledge and the broader community of variously motivated enthusiasts that developed alongside them. Based on an extensive examination of archival material, popular and scientific periodicals, and a variety of other primary and secondary sources, I have sought to reconstruct the layered interactions between expert ornithologists seeking to forge a discipline and profession and the collectors, taxidermists, natural history dealers, birdwatchers, conservationists, and others with whom they were affiliated. My study begins in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the first stirring of a disciplinary consciousness in American ornithology, and ends on the eve of World War II, when the field finally achieved the hallmarks of a full-blown profession.²²

Chapter 1 explores the sources and consequences of America’s growing fascination with natural history in the years following the Civil War and the emergence of what I call the culture of collecting. The next chapter narrows its gaze to one segment of that larger culture, the ornithological community, and traces the rise of expansive collecting networks that had scientific ornithologists at their center and a variety of collectors on their periphery. With encouragement from scientists, the appearance of reliable collecting manuals, and the increasing popularity of game hunting, bird collecting became an important (though male-dominated) pastime in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century.

The ornithological community, once firmly united by a shared interest in collecting specimens, became more fragmented in the years following the creation of the AOU in 1883. Chapter 3 shows how a small group of scientific ornithologists founded the AOU and how they used the new organization to further their disciplinary and professional aspirations. It also documents the resistance offered by those who resented scientists’ attempts to control the association. Chapter 4 focuses on the issue of nomenclatural reform, a concern that, more than any other, had prompted the creation of the AOU. Proponents of the self-proclaimed “American school” of ornithology not only sought to produce a single, authoritative list of North American bird forms, they also wanted that list to incorporate an innovation they (falsely) claimed as their own: trinomial nomenclature. The campaign for formal recognition of subspecies became yet another source of tension between scientific ornithologists and other bird enthusiasts. Many of the latter challenged not only the need to recognize the minute distinctions upon which subspecific differences were based, but even the need for any kind of specialized scientific nomenclature.

Chapters 5 and 6 document the AOU’s extensive involvement in turn-of-the-century wildlife conservation initiatives. Although central to the mobilization of the first Audubon movement that began in the 1880s (chapter 5) and the second, more enduring version that began in the 1890s (chapter 6), the AOU never resolved the fundamental tension between its commitment to bird protection and its repeated assertions of the right to collect even obviously threatened species. At the same time, the bird protection movement caused friction within the larger ornithological community when scientific ornithologists moved to narrow the definition of “legitimate” collecting in the hope of maintaining the privilege for themselves. Because of this and other conflicts, the AOU’s commitment to bird protection was marked by periods of intense activism punctuated by periods of retrenchment.

Closely related to the bird protection movement was the remarkable growth of popular interest in birdwatching, a development explored in chapter 7. Scientific ornithologists hoping to cultivate allies for the bird protection movement, generate income from the sale of field guides, and recruit volunteers to monitor bird movements and population trends were among the strongest promoters of birdwatching in the United States. After the turn of the century, the activity gained a popularity beyond the wildest dreams of its supporters. In the process, however, it also provoked additional dissension within the ornithological community as birdwatchers rushed to publish increasing numbers of unverifiable “sight records”—observations of species and subspecies beyond their established ranges.

The final chapter examines the campaign to reform the AOU and American ornithology more generally in the years surrounding the Great Depression. Leading the call for change were the first generation of scientific ornithologists with graduate training. With aid from Ernst Mayr, an émigré ornithologist from Germany who came to the United States in the early 1930s, reformers sought to broaden the focus of ornithology, raise the standards of research, and instill the AOU with a stronger professional consciousness. Yet, even as they sought to reform American ornithology, the new university-trained scientists continued to recognize a role for amateur ornithologists.

In 1978, nearly a century after the creation of the AOU, the noted ornithologist Harold Mayfield argued that the relationship between professional and amateur ornithologists might best be characterized as “symbiotic.”²³ Even in the modern era of increasing specialization, advanced biological degrees, and ornithological careers, Mayfield claimed, amateur ornithologists still had much to offer the science of ornithology. I would argue that bird enthusiasts of various sorts have been an important part of the ornithological community from the beginning and that the development of the science of ornithology can only be properly understood through a study of the interactions within that community.