NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and the colors of flowers; to the majority, however, the enjoyment is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that derived from a short spell of prattling by a healthy baby. Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us.
The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature.
BIRDS
BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. Birds of New Mexico, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird books. Much on habits.
BEDICHEK, ROY. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947) and Karankaway Country (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all life.
BRANDT, HERBERT. Arizona and Its Bird Life, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the land. Herbert Brandt's Texas Bird Adventures, illustrated by George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds, though birds are here.
DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. The Birds of California, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific data.
DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: "The Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore," in In the Shadow of History, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939. OP. "Bob More: Man and Bird Man," Southwest Review, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (Autumn, 1941).
NICE, MARGARET MORSE. The Birds of Oklahoma, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey publication.
OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript form. "A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it." The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the Southwest Review, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had better pipe down.