William Brewster was a self-educated ornithologist who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From the mid-1800s until his death in 1919, he amassed a tremendous specimen collection and became one of the foremost experts on birds in the northeastern United States. In 1906, the Nuttall Ornithological Club published The Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts, Brewster’s exhaustive work on the avian fauna of his own backyard. While the book is a valuable historical resource, it is Brewster’s journals and diaries—spanning over 50 years of his life—that contain the goldmine of his recorded observations. Last year, the Ernst Mayr Library made these journals and diaries available on BHL.... Read more about A Bridge to the Past: The Writings of William Brewster