There are three great loves in my life: my family, books, and natural history. Of these, two – books and natural history – make superb topics for innumerable essays that may interest a broad section of the reading public (while I could also write unendingly on the subject of my family, decorum and a reasonable sense of privacy prevents me from doing so to any length more than the occasional anecdote or reference). To natural history, particularly the watching and study of birdlife, I have devoted a substantial amount of time over the past few years. However as regular readers will know, I have a much broader interest in the natural world than birds alone; an interest the breadth of which demonstrates itself in the wide variety of subjects to which I devote untold hours spent reading. Thus it occurred to me: why not establish a site entirely devoted to the news and reviewing of natural history books? Giving myself no answer to the contrary, I have done precisely that in the creation of The Well-read Naturalist.
Why, you may ask, am I doing this? Quite simply, because from my years developing the bird watching market for an international optics firm, I have learned that of all the many possible areas of nature study to which people may apply themselves and their time, bird watching has clearly defined itself as the one activity with a definable demographic to which commercial activity, including publishing, may be effectively directed. Consequently much of what is frequently reviewed in terms of natural history titles are books related to bird watching. As a life-long bibliophile with a deep interest in nature, I know that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of splendid books on natural history related subjects published each year that fail to obtain the attention that (I think) they deserve simply due to the lack of a well defined or popularly understood demographic toward which reviews of them can be directed (when was the last time you saw a copy of Moths Illustrated, Amphibian Digest, or Great Geologists of the Nineteenth Century Monthly on your local news-stand?). To my knowledge, The Well-read Naturalist is the first site dedicated to the broad spectrum of natural history titles and as such it is my hope that it will become a primary resource for those interested in the marvelous diversity that the term “natural history” encompasses.
Thus I hope the readers of Born Again Bird Watcher (a site that will most certainly continue and to which I plan to devote just as much time as I do presently) will visit The Well-read Naturalist and, finding it useful to their needs, will subscribe to its RSS feed and come to rely on it as a source of news and reviews for their natural history reading interests. Additionally, as the bird watching authorial circle is a close knit one, I want to make it perfectly well known that I am in no way intending The Well-read Naturalist to be a competitor to the long-established and deservedly well-regarded Birder’s Library, which I hold in high esteem and the author of which I praise as a ground-breaking blogger for the work he has done reviewing birding titles over these many years. In fact, a visit to The Well-read Naturalist will show The Birder’s Library to be prominently placed in the list of book-related websites that I recommend. It is my sincere hope that interested readers will visit both The Birder’s Library as well as The Well-read Naturalist to keep abreast of the latest publishing developments in the natural history related subjects that interest them most.
