The Feathered Scribe

B IRDERS interested in American history are fond of noting that Columbus knew he was near land when he saw a flock of migrating birds.1 Thus Europe's discovery of the New World is synchronous with the discovery of New World birds. This fact is not just a starting point for the present article; Columbus's use of the birds is symptomatic of the next three hundred years of American ornithological writing. He was not interested in determining the species; these birds were but a chance sign in a more important venture, and birds as signs were incorporated into the discourse of discovery. Indeed, few American ornithologists writing before the publication of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands ( 73 I-I743)2 described birds in a discourse we would consider ornithological. The principal function of such early tracts as Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land in Virginia (i 590), William Wood's New Englands Prospect (i634), and Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (i637) was to promote immigration by advertising a colony's opportunities. These tracts listed birds primarily to assure potential settlers of an adequate food supply; hence these field reporters classified birds as a natural commodity. Southern reporters such as John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina (I 709) and William Byrd in Natural History of Virginia, or the Newly Discovered Eden (I737) claimed to write natural history, and they treated the land and its inhabitants in much greater depth than the earlier writers had.3 Lawson signed himself Surveyor General of Caro

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