📚 Ornithology

Birds studied seriously: migration, plumage and song, from Audubon’s plates to the ringing programme.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject ornithology in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Birds of America	John James Audubon	1827	83
	The natural history of Selborne	Gilbert White	1789	75
	Natural history of birds, fish, insects, and reptiles	Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon	1792	33
	The birds of the British Isles	Bannerman, David Armitage	1953	29
	Histoire naturelle de Buffon	René-Richard Castel	1985	28
	Handbook of birds of eastern North America	Frank Michler Chapman	1895	26
	Key to North American birds	Elliott Coues	1872	23
	General zoology	George Shaw	1800	17
	Avian Biology	Donald S. Farner	1971	14
	Ornithologie du Canada	J. M. Le Moine	1861	12
	A history of North American birds	Spencer Fullerton Baird	1874	11
	The pigeon	Wendell Mitchell Levi	1941	10
	Current Ornithology	Richard Johnston	1986	10
	Current Ornithology	Val Nolan Jr.	2010	10
	Ornitology	Sir William Jardine	1800	9
	The birds of Canada	Alexander Milton Ross	1871	9
	A manual of North American birds	Robert Ridgway	1887	9
	The life of birds	David Attenborough	1998	9
	A popular handbook of the ornithology of the United States and Canada	Montague Chamberlain	1891	8
	A popular handbook of the ornithology of eastern North America	Nuttall, Thomas	1894	8
	The birds of South America	Robert S. Ridgely	1989	8
	Ornithology	Austin Loomer Rand	1967	7
	Ornithology	Frank B. Gill	1990	7
	Current Ornithology	D.M. Power	1993	7
	Parrots	Tony Juniper	1998	7
	Essays on natural history, chiefly ornithology	Charles Waterton	1838	6
	Wilson's American ornithology	Alexander Wilson	1840	6
	Birds in their relations to man	Clarence Moores Weed	1903	6
	The birds of Washington	William Leon Dawson	1909	6
	The book of bird life	Arthur Augustus Allen	1930	6

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.