Scope
The Bird Archive offers 253 files of the associated calls and songs of bird species inhabiting Amherst and its environs from C19 to C21. All of the birds included in the Bird Archive have been recorded as present in Amherst in at least one of the three centuries—19th, 20th, 21st—represented.
Key Sources
Birding Guidebooks (Occurrence, Presence)
C19
- H. L. Clark’s The Birds of Amherst &Vicinity, including nearly the whole of Hampshire County (1887), originally published in Amherst, Mass., by J. E. Williams and now also accessible via the HathiTrust.
- Ebenezer Emmons’s Birds of Massachusetts (1833), originally published in Dr. Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology, Minerology, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts,” pp. 528-51.
- J. A. Allen’s “Catalogue of the Birds Found at Springfield, Mass., with Notes on their Migrations, Habits, & c., together with a list of those birds found in the State not yet observed at Springfield,” originally published in the Proceedings of the Essex Institute at Salem, Vol. IV, No. 2, September 1864, and now also accessible via the HathiTrust.
C20
C21
Bird Data (Nest Materials; Habitat; Field Notes)
Data on habitat and nest materials has been gathered from Audubon’s Field Guide to North American Birds and from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, as well as from the key sources of data for this site: e.g. Clark 1887 and 1906 and Bagg & Eliot 1937.
Historical Field Notes principally derive from H. L. Clark’s The Birds of Amherst &Vicinity, including nearly the whole of Hampshire County (1887) and Aaron Clark Bagg and Samuel Atkins Eliot Jr.’s Birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts (1937).
Bird Data (Body Mass)
Raw data on the masses of birds was found in Dunning, J.B. Body masses of North American birds (2018), edited by M. Ghadrdan. Eugene, OR: The IWRC.
Global Conservation Status (2025)
Conservation data on Dickinson’s birds in our century is readily available. Our primary source for this information is the IUCN Red List. In future, we plan to include regional conservation information. For the specific environmental threats to birds occurring in North America, The American Bird Conservancy site is an excellent resource.
Sound and Spectrograph Files
The source for all bird-sound and sonograph files in the works is Xeno-Canto (https://xeno-canto.org/), created in 2005 by Bob Planque and William-Pier Vellinga, and administrated by the Netherlands-based Xeno-canto foundation (Stichting Xeno-canto voor natuurgeluiden). We are deeply grateful both to the individual recordists and to XenoCanto for their field work, their generous sharing of data, and their commitment to citizen science. Individual recordists are acknowledged both on the Individual Bird Pages (“Data Sources”) and in Project Map (Sources).
Searching the Bird Archive
Bird files are searchable by species’ common names; appearance on Dickinson’s ‘bird list’—i.e., the list we have constructed of the wild songbirds named in her poems; and current (C21) conservation status according to the 2025 IUCN Red List https://www.iucnredlist.org/.
For additional information on the Bird Archive,
see Project Map.
