Abstract
THE present volume is a companion to the “Home Life of a Golden Eagle,” noticed in NATURE of May 26, 1910. It is about the same; size, but four biographies instead of one are contained in it. The “Home Life of a Golden Eagle” as a vie-intime will be difficult to excel. It admitted us, by means of that impersonal spy, the camera, to the plosest. intimacy with the entire domestic arrangements, and to the unbroken succession of parental duties of the royal birds. Mr. Beetham has attempted to do for the spoonbill, the white stork, and the common and the purple herons, what Mr. Macpherson did for the eagle. We have to confess with regret that he has succeeded only multum post intervallum. Both watchers employed from an ambush the same methods of the masked camera; but we have, from Mr. Beetham fuller details of the methods than of the object for which they were the end. Both were experts in picture-taking, and our author's results are in no way inferior to those of Mr. Macpherson. The methods they employed are, it seems to us, those by which the accurate life-histories of our birds up to the standard of that of the golden eagle can be obtained. It will take a long time before they can all be biographed, but it will eventually be accomplished so long as among the photo-ornithologists are to be numbered men like Mr. Beetham, who despise the unnumbered difficulties, discomforts, and often very real dangers necessary to securing unimpeachable records.
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Photographic Biography of Birds 1 . Nature 85, 544–545 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/085544a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/085544a0