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Eastern Birds; 2nd ed., 2001
Author: James Coe
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“James Coe’s Eastern Birds is a tour-de-force, a positively brilliant guide.”
Brian Cassie,
Bird Observer of Eastern Massachusetts
"Coe’s paintings are superb—sensitive and clean, with exquisite habitat and behavioral vignettes that evoke a sense of place.”
Julie Zickefoose,
Bird Watcher’s Digest
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Order Eastern Birds
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The publication of my original Golden Field Guide Eastern Birds was the culmination of a long apprenticeship and many years as a bird guide illustrator.
Starting at age 12 with my own crude colored-pencil drawings of birds from books I found at the local library, through my yearly studio visits as a teenager with mentor Don Eckelberry, who was one of the world’s finest bird illustrators, to my later collaboration with artist Guy Tudor on the Birds of the World illustrations for Frank Gill’s Ornithology textbook, I seemed destined for a career creating bird guides. So it was a dream come true when the publishers of the renowned Golden Guides invited me to submit a proposal to write and illustrate a pair of regional beginner's field guides to the birds of North America.
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Original 1994 edition
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The project took seven years -- far longer than my editors or I had envisioned. My goal was not to recreate what had been done before; I wanted to do something new. Rather than depict our familiar birds lined up on a sterile white background, I wanted to paint them in the context of their natural habitats. I wanted to show them doing what they do in nature. And I wanted to create illustrations that would both help beginning birders navigate through the book, but also visually simplify bird identification. On top of that, I wanted the book to be beautiful and fun to use.
My series of twelve unique "Master Plates," set in the front of the guide, were designed as a visual index to the rest of the book. Some had an array of birds set in a habitat scene. Others illustrated groupings of "confusing" songbirds that were similar in appearance but which were unrelated and therefore described on different pages of the main text.
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"Master Plate" of Roadside Birds showing an array of unrelated species together in a familiar setting.
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Miscellaneous Long-legged Waders, from Eastern Birds
Please feel free to contact me directly if you want
to purchase a signed copy of Eastern Birds.
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Eastern Birds received glowing reviews when it was first released. And I am as proud of the book today as I was in 1994. But my timing was terrible: Golden Press (Western Publishing), struggling for years, finally went under and was sold to St. Martin's Press before I had completed the manuscript for the companion guide. Despite efforts to revive the project, Western Birds remains unpublished.
I have posted several of the paintings prepared for that book in the collection of "Bird Illustrations" on my web page of Artwork here. I believe they represent the very best of my field guide artwork.
Although the entire series of Golden Guides has become increasingly hard to find in bookstores, Eastern Birds is still available and it continues to receive an occasional rave review online.
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