Thursday, August 9, 2012

Baby Bird Portraits


My library job  seldom requires me to visit those sections of the building where science books live, but there is no part of the library that I don't end up poking through occasionally in the course of resolving some puzzle or other. That is how I chanced upon Baby Bird Portraits, published in 1998 by the University of Oklahoma Press (and still in print).

George Miksch Sutton (1898-1982) was a professor of ornithology with a special talent for painting the birds he studied. He worked in the American Midwest for most of his long career. The reproductions shown here are samples from a collection of his watercolors in the library of the Field Museum in Chicago. They depict "a variety of downy nonpasserine chicks and nestlings."   

 Northern Bobwhite (Oklahoma, 1936)

 Ruffed Grouse (Michigan, 1948)

Lesser Prairie-Chicken (Oklahoma, 1936)

Common Moorhen (Michigan, 1948)

 White-rumped Sandpiper (Jenny Lind Island, 1962)

 Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Michigan, 1948)

 Horned Lark (Michigan, 1948)

Northern Cardinal (Oklahoma, 1936)