A Bird-Lover in the West
Public-domain ebook
A Bird-Lover in the West
Language: en5,504 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Animals-Wild-Birds·Travel Writing·Nature/Gardening/Animals
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #27902.
About this book
Olive Thorne Miller’s A Bird‑Lover in the West is a nature memoir that opens with a litany of western bird species, each listed by common name and scientific designation. The opening pages move from the Western meadow‑lark and Horned lark through a succession of songbirds, wren, dipper and sparrow, establishing a detailed inventory of the avian life the author intends to observe. From this catalog the narrative shifts to a reflective essay on the need for rest, as the narrator departs a bustling New York train for the Colorado Rockies in May 1892. The prose weaves personal contemplation with vivid descriptions of the landscape, setting the tone for a series of chapters that blend field notes, poetic musings and travel anecdotes.
The voice is earnest and lyrical, echoing the late‑nineteenth‑century naturalist tradition that prized both scientific observation and moral reflection. Miller’s style is dense with botanical and ornithological terminology, yet softened by frequent allusions to poets such as Lowell, Emerson and Wordsworth. Readers who enjoy detailed wildlife accounts, historic travel writing, or the contemplative tone of early American nature essays will find this work rewarding, especially those who appreciate a blend of factual cataloguing with personal meditation on the restorative power of the western wilderness.
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Olive Thorne Miller
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1900
Copyright, 1894, BY H. M. MILLER.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
INTRODUCTORY.
The studies in this volume were all made, as the title indicates, in the West; part of them in Colorado (1891), in Utah (1893), and the remainder (1892) in what I have called "The Middle Country," being Southern Ohio, and West only relatively to New England and New York, where most of my studies have been made.
Several chapters have appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" and other magazines, and in the "Independent" and "Harper's Bazar," while others are now for the first time published.
OLIVE THORNE MILLER.
CONTENTS.
IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
Ii. in the Cottonwoods 17
Western wood-pewee. Contopus richardsonii. Western house wren. Troglodytes aedon aztecus. Towhee. Pipilo erythrophthalmus.
Iii. an Uproar of Song 32
Western meadow-lark. Sturnella magna neglecta. Horned lark. Otocoris alpestris leucolaema. Yellow warbler. Dendroica aestiva. Western wood-pewee. Contopus richardsonii. Humming-bird. Trochilus colubris. Long-tailed chat. Icteria virens longicauda.
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