Watching Birds at a Straw Stack | Bird Watching

by

Edmund Selous

Featured in

Tonight, we’ll be reading another chapter from the book "Bird Watching" published in 1901 by Edmund Selous, titled "Watching Birds at a Straw Stack". If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to the Blackbirds episode from this book as well. The author started as a conventional naturalist, 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. And to be clear, Straw Stacks are similar to Hay Stacks in that both are field crops, although hay is the remains of grasses and straw is made from the stalks of wheat.