Tonight, we’ll be reading another chapter from the book “Bird Watching” published in 1901 by Edmund Selous, titled “Watching Birds in the Greenwoods.”

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to our “Blackbirds” episode, “Watching Birds from a Haystack” episode, and “Watching Seabirds”, from this series as well.

The author started as a conventional naturalist of his time, but Selous developed a hatred of the common practice at the time of killing animals for scientific study and was a pioneer of bird-watching as a method of scientific study. The author was a solitary man and was not well known in ornithological circles. He avoided both the company of ornithologists and reading their observations so as to base his conclusions entirely on his own observations.

The word “greenwood” refers to both unseasoned firewood and a forest in full leaf, as in summer.