American Goldfinch photographed with an Argus C-3 35mm camera in the author’s backyard in 1959.

Back in the early nineteenth century, birding began with a bang, specifically from a gun–then politely termed a fowling piece. See bird, shoot bird, prepare bird skin, add bird to your cabinet of curiosities. Next came low-magnification opera glasses, a useful tool indeed for seeing wild birds without having to kill them. With opera glasses, you might say birding entered its fledgling stage. Cameras really became part of the birding world early in the twentieth century. Now one’s cabinet of curiosities could include photographs of live birds taken “in the wild.” Well, sort of. The photos, especially in the earliest days of bird photography, were in black and white, usually distant, and often fuzzy. Cameras were heavy, bulky, and hard to carry in the field. Nonetheless, intrepid ornithologists such as Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History braved the hazards of the still-wild Florida Everglades and many other challenging places to photograph the nesting cycles of birds, usually large birds such as pelicans and herons. This meant carting photo blinds, makeshift platforms for eye-to-eye views of subjects in the nest, and all of the photo equipment. He succeeded amazingly well. Chapman documented and shared his efforts in a book titled Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist, which included “250 photographs from nature by the author” (Chapman 1908).

Though color photography was invented in 1861, it did not come into common use for bird photography until the twentieth century. The person who pioneered color photography of birds was Arthur A. Allen, an ornithology professor at Cornell University who founded the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in 1915 (Allen 1962). Arthur A. Allen was to color bird photography what Ludlow Griscom was to field identification of birds. The film of choice was Kodachrome, which was relatively slow and thus required use of a stable camera. Dr. Allen wrote many articles for the National Geographic Magazine. Some of his articles, all illustrated with striking Kodachrome color photos of birds, were published in a book that bore the title Stalking Birds with Color Camera (Allen 1951). Other noteworthy bird photographers who used Kodachrome in their books were Hal H. Harrison (1948) and Helen Cruickshank (1953). Color photography of birds did not immediately surpass black-and-white photography and for a few years black-and-white was still in common usage in bird books (Cruickshank 1947, Peterson 1948).