Frank Finn eBooks

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Enjoy 11 well-illustrated eBooks this week by Frank Finn from the early decades of the 1900s. Most of them are about birds and there is a skew toward Asia since the author spent almost a decade in India. The Wikipedia article was shorter than I expected so I searched further and found an obituary in Nature from 1932 which was more informative. These books are freely available on Internet Archive and worth browsing!

The world's birds a simple and popular classification of the birds of the world

The wild beasts of the world

Bird Behavior physical and physiological

Phillips’ A Natural History of the Ducks

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Internet Archive has the 4 volumes of John Charles Phillips’ A Natural History of the Ducks; the books were published in the early 1920s – well illustrated in color and black and white from drawings by Frank W. Benson, Allan Brooks, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The author was educated as a doctor but never practiced professionally…instead focusing on hunting, zoology, ornithology and the environment.  He published over 200 articles on his activities including animal breeding, sport hunting, ornithology, wildlife conservation, faunal surveys and systematic reviews, and Mendelian genetics. I enjoyed browsing these eBooks for their illustrations…wondering about the modern classification of ducks and how many of them have become endangered in the years since Phillips observed them.

A natural history of the ducks V1

A natural history of the ducks V2

A natural history of the ducks V3

A natural history of the ducks V4

Nehrling/Ridgway North American Birds

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There are 4 Henry Nehrling books about birds available on Internet Archive. The illustrations are the work of Robert Ridgway. Both men were products of the Midwest – born in Wisconsin and Illinois respectively in the 1850s. Both became ornithologists and horticulturists (Nehrling skewing toward horticulture and Ridgway toward ornithology). Were they friends or was the creation of the books just a transaction?

Die Nord-Amerikanische Vogelwelt Heft 1-10

Die Nord-Amerikanische Vogelwelt

Our native birds of song and beauty V1

Our native birds of song and beauty V2

It is easy to spot familiar birds in the illustrations!