Francis Lee Jaques was the first bird artist I ever knew. Indeed, I had never met an ornithologist of any sort when I boarded the train for New York City to attend my first convention of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1925.

Arriving a day early, I found my way to the American Museum of Natural History, the fine old institution on 79th Street and Central Park West, which pioneered the art of the diorama or habitat display. Outstanding at that time was a great oval dome from which a wedge of geese and an assortment of other flying birds...

EVERYONE HAS TO BE born sometime, I suppose. Anyway I was-on September 28, 1887, in a house owned by my grandfather. The house was a small two-story affair on a large lot bordered on the back by the Rock Island Rail way-double track-which had been completed only about 25 years before. A very busy railroad.

With these words, Francis Lee Jaques began his autobiography, mentioning a railroad in practically the same breath as his birth. The place was Geneseo, Illinois, a small midwestern town where Lee lived with his father, Ephraim Parker Jaques, and his mother, Emma Jane (Monninger) Jaques....