Bird Student: An Autobiography

SUTTON (George Miksch)

ISBN 10: 0292707274 / ISBN 13: 9780292707276

Published by University of Texas Press, 1980

About this Item

1980, 8vo, 216pp. 10 attractive colour plates, black and white illustrations, light fading to spine of dust wrapper, very good.

Seller Inventory # 3893

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bird Student: An Autobiography
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication Date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0292707274
• ISBN 13: 9780292707276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Ornithology

About this title

Synopsis

At thirteen, George Miksch Sutton planned a school of ornithology centered around his collection of bird skins, feathers, bones, nests, eggs, and a prized stuffed crow. As an adult, he became one of the most prominent ornithologists and bird artists of the twentieth century. He describes his metamorphosis from amateur to professional in Bird Student.
Born in 1898, Sutton gives us his clearest memories of his boyhood in Nebraska, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois, Texas, and West Virginia with his closely knit family. Recognizing birds, identifying them correctly, drawing them, and writing about them became more and more important to him. His intense admiration for Louis Agiz Fuertes had a good deal to do with his beginning to draw birds in earnest, and his correspondence and his 1916 summer visit with the generous Fuertes taught him to look at birds with the eyes of a professional artist and to consider the possibility of making ornithology his career.
By 1918, Sutton had talked himself into a job at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which gave him fresh opportunities to learn and travel, and his 1920 field trip to the Labrador Peninsula stimulated his lifelong interest in arctic birds. Further expeditions to James Bay, the east coast of Hudson Bay—on leave from his job as state ornithologist of Pennsylvania—and Southampton Island at the north end of Hudson Bay, in search of the elusive blue goose and its nesting grounds, give us glimpses of field methods before the days of sophisticated equipment. Sutton ends his autobiography in 1935, with an account of his graduate days at Cornell University and his position as curator of the Fuertes Memorial Collection of Birds.

About the Author

George Miksch Sutton (1898–1982) was George Lynn Cross Research Professor of zoology and curator of birds, Stovall Museum of Science and History, University of Oklahoma.