[By Chuck Almdale]

While cleaning the bookshelves the other day, we discovered this old pamphlet in a ziplock bag. I don’t remember how we got it. After looking it over, I decided that it held information that others might find useful and interesting. Below are the first few and the last of the 52 pages. It’s by Joseph Grinnell (UC Berkeley and Wikipedia), well-known ornithologist, and was published in Pasadena in March 1898, 128 years ago.

We scanned the entire book and I put it into a PDF file on this blog. The initial page file size was over 33,000 Kb per page. Putting it into a PDF file reduced the entire to only(!) 20,201 Kb. I didn’t want to make the file size of each page any smaller in order to maintain print quality. There is nothing in the PDF file other than scanned copies of the page.

It’s pretty interesting to read, with an enormous number of changes between then and now. I will be making a 2nd version comparing it to current nomenclature, but that will take a while as it contains 299 species. I wanted to get this out to anyone who is interested. Feel free to pass this link on. Let me know if you have any problems reading or downloading it.

Link to the PDF document. You can read it online or download a copy. It takes 30 seconds to retrieve, then click the little window to open it, and it then opens in MS Word.

Here’s the first few pages and the last page.

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