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Up until the early 1900s the birding scene was still dominated by the shotgun set.  That is, to identify the birds that one could see, one shot them and collected their still-warm carcasses for identification purposes.  Some had switched over to using the low-powered optics of the day but this new method of identifying birds [...]

In 1955 Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher published Wild America, the tale of their travels across North America, from park to park, and bird to bird.  Peterson had convinced Fisher to take the trip with him, partially to show Fisher the America that most tourists did not see, but, as Peterson confessed in the [...]