About the Book

Chester A. Reed was already the author of the pocket Land Birds and Water Birds guides when he published this book of camera studies in 1911. Photographing living wild birds then meant hours in a blind, improvised hides, and a great deal of failure.

The pictures are the point — more than two hundred of them, of birds at their nests and in their homes — and Reed's text tells you both what the bird is doing and how the photograph was obtained.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page, with the original photographs.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1911 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.