{"id":1129,"date":"2016-02-03T20:21:35","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T20:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/ernstmayrlibrary\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2016-02-03T20:21:35","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T20:21:35","slug":"notes-from-william-brewster-american-robin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ernstmayrlibrary\/2016\/02\/03\/notes-from-william-brewster-american-robin\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from William Brewster: American Robin"},"content":{"rendered":"

“It is sunset and as I sit in my study in the Museum a Robin is singing in an elm in the garden. What a hopeful, earnest strain! It always cheers and encourages me. Our Robin must have a brave heart and a pure conscience.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

– William Brewster, in correspondence to his friend, ornithologist Frank Michler Chapman.\u00a0March 26, 1893. Cambridge, Mass.<\/span><\/p>\n

William Brewster (1851-1919) grew up in a Cambridge of farm fields filled with singing\u00a0Eastern Blue Birds<\/a>\u00a0and large flocks of Snow Buntings<\/a> where we now have introduced House Sparrows<\/a>. As a teen, he collected birds and practiced taxidermy, and carefully noted the dates when his family ate the year\u2019s first lettuce and strawberries. If you\u2019ve browsed the galleries at Harvard\u2019s Museum of Natural History, then you\u2019ve passed by some of his life\u2019s work; after working as an animal specimen curator at the museum for many years, he bequeathed his collection of birds and other animals to the museum. <\/span><\/p>\n

Brewster\u2019s fascination for birds and his observant note-taking laid the groundwork for his career as a prominent North American amateur ornithologist. He was the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and a president of the American Ornithologists\u2019 Union.<\/span><\/p>\n

An ongoing project<\/a>\u00a0at the the Ernst Mayr Library has been the digitization and transcription of Brewster\u2019s diaries, field journals, and correspondences. Some of these journals<\/a>\u00a0and diaries<\/a>\u00a0are available to read on the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and we are working toward making all his notes\u00a0accessible for study.<\/span><\/p>\n

I joined the library a year ago as an assistant for this project, and I\u2019ve spent this time immersed in Brewster\u2019s world. As a Boston-area native, I’ve found some of it surprisingly<\/span>\u00a0familiar. Brewster watched the landscape and ecology change dramatically over the course of his life, yet some of his favorite local haunts still draw bird-watchers and dog-walkers today: Fresh Pond and Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, Walden Pond in Concord, and Ponkapoag Pond in the Blue Hills, to name just a few. His notes are an enormously valuable resource for scientists interested in studying ecological and climatological change, but they\u2019re also sprinkled with amusing observations, beautiful scenes, intriguing facts and bizarre stories that I\u2019d like to share with you in a series of short blog posts.<\/p>\n

Roger Tory Peterson\u2019s original field guide called the American Robin<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe one bird that everyone knows.\u201d The Robin that Brewster heard on that March evening seems a perfect place to begin this series. Not only does the passage express a beautiful sentiment, but the familiarity of\u00a0Robins and their sounds can make it feel quite comfortable for us to sit at an unfamiliar desk in Brewster’s museum office, watching the sun set in 1893.\u00a0His\u00a0comment on the \u201cbrave heart and a pure conscience\u201d of the bird certainly isn\u2019t objective science, but it connects us to a moment that I think we\u2019ve all experienced before: an animal encounter that punctures our daily routine to remind us, briefly, of how <\/span>wide <\/span><\/i>the world is. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Play\u00a0the video below to hear a Robin\u2019s \u201chopeful, earnest strain\u201d similar to the one that uplifted\u00a0Brewster’s spirits in March of 1893. Those of us who are feeling winter-weary sure could do with the brave winter Robin\u2019s encouragement.<\/span><\/p>\n