Topic summary
Bird watching
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Birdwatching.
History
The phrase "bird watching" appeared for the first time as the title of the book Bird Watching by Edmund Selous in 1901. In North America, the identification of birds, once thought possible only by shooting, was made possible by the emergence of optics and field identification guides. The earliest field guide in the US was Birds through an Opera Glass (1889) by Florence Bailey.