Teaching a state to love its birds

The subtitle states the case in two parts: Their Economic Value and Aesthetic Beauty. In 1923 West Virginia’s Department of Agriculture published this guide to argue that birds were worth knowing and protecting on both counts, useful to the state and a pleasure to see. That the argument came from an agriculture department says something about how the period linked farming, bird study and the protection of wildlife.

I. H. Johnston, the state ornithologist, compiled the accounts of the native songbirds and other familiar species, with colour plates that include a meadowlark, a song sparrow and a sparrow hawk. The book ends on a practical note, with a run of designs for nesting boxes and birdhouses, so that a reader could build one and bring the birds closer.

This copy is in its original pale blue-green printed wrappers, stapled at the side, with a colour picture of a meadowlark set into the front. The wrappers are rubbed and spotted with light creasing at the corners, and the pages are toned. The plates and birdhouse diagrams are there, but the pages have not been counted for completeness.