Guide to Bird Watching

Bird Watching as a Sport
Herbert K. Job

I begain the sport of bird watching when I was a young boy, and now, after thirty years of the sport, I like it just as well as ever. And there are thousands , increasing thousands of men who have the same feeling. The sport has in it all the elements of adventure and activity, just the thing to alternate with the strain and confinement of professional or business life, a means of health and strength, of keeping enthusiasm and youthful freshness.

Of course, any outdoor sport is useful in this direction, yet the quest of the study of nature, in some of its departments, has special advantages for providing refreshing resource for hte mind, as well as for the body. Bird study has a peculiar inducement in that it is seasonable the year round, and deals with living subjects, which are beautiful and of special fascination because of their power of flight. The gunner and the fisherman at the close of their short season - all too brief it seems -- put away their implements of the chase with regret, for it will be many long months before it will be time again to start out. But the ornithologist may go whenever his time permits, when the longing for the wild floods his soul.

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If there were any question of the right of bird study to rank as a sport, and a leading one at that, a certain discovery made some years ago banishes all possible doubt. This was the discovery that photography could be employed in bird study with splendid success. At once this gave to the bird student a weapon, an implement, putting him in the class of sportsmen. Nearly everyone now knows about "hunting with the camera." This is not confined to any one department of natural history, but is the capture upon a photograph of the image of any wild living creature -- mammal, bird, fish or even insect. Birds offer special inducements for this pursuit, as they are far more numerous than the wild mammals. Moreover, fish can seldom be photographed save in captivity, and insects are small and to popular.

Studying bird and animal life with the camera certainly is a splendid sport. It destroys no life, yet yeilds results far superior to those of gun and flesh-pot in our stage of civilization where we need not shoot to eat. How often nowadays one reads the admission of some hunter who comes close upon some fine game, that he wished he had a camera instead of his gun. To shoot successfully with the camera requires far more skill, nerve, patience, brain-power, than with the gun, and yet is not hard enough to be impractical. In the highest essentials of sport, to my mind, the camera stands far ahead of the gun.