Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

When you see this color, what would you call it? Simply brown won't do, neither will chocolate, because it's a little redder than that. Reddish brown works, but doesn't quite capture the essence of the color. No. The color as the title suggests is rufous. As I type this, a red squiggle indicating an incorrectly spelled word has appeared below it, as if it had no concept of this color's existence. This is something I've noticed all my life however. Whenever you spell it in Word or another word-processing program (are there others?) it says it's incorrect. But why you might ask am I bringing this up on a birding blog? Well, for one, color is an important aspect to describing and enjoying birds. Their myriad shades, pigments, and hues mesmerize us and make us so appreciative for the extreme variety that they possess. Having a vocabulary to describe those colors is very important as well. The guide that seems to do it the best is Frank M. Chapman's Birds o...

Ludlow Griscom (1890-1959) while not as famous as Concord's Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, his presence is still appreciated by ornithologists and birders who have graced a local library and perhaps found a curious volume called "Birds of Concord". The book itself isn't a field guide, but instead a reference for any bird lover that wished at the time to better understand the mechanisms behind bird abundance and rarity as well as why migration occurred and what birds were considered common in this small, but rigorously surveyed portion of Massachusetts. Griscom himself was one of the first ornithologists to shift away from "shotgun ornithology" and instead use the field marks present on a bird body to determine its identity. Around the time of Griscom, it was common for those studying birds to have to shoot them in order to tender an identification of the bird in hand. This was certainly true for smaller, harder to see songbirds like sp...