history of the term “birdwatching”

Good morning all ³Birdwatching², according to Wikipedia was a term first used in 1918, but I cannot find an original reference. Does anybody out there know? Regards Denise

3 comments to history of the term “birdwatching”

  • Denise Goodfellow

    Russell, thanks very much for this. And thanks to all who responded to my query.

    Regards Denise

    on 29/9/11 10:42 AM, rdwoodford@aanet.com.au at rdwoodford@aanet.com.au wrote:

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  • admin

    The Australian Digital Newspaper Archive has no record of “birdwatcher”, “birdwatching” or “bird-watching” until about 1904. I found quite a few records during the 1890s for the search “birdwatcher” – but these all turned out to be OCR misreadings of the name of a racehorse, Birdcatcher!

    From 1904, articles about bird-watching appeared quite regularly in various newspapers.

    Russell

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  • Andrew Taylor

    The phrase “bird watching” appears to have had little or no use in print until Edmund Selous’s 1901 book of that title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Selous Andrew ===============================

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