From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds. Here, Weidensaul traces American birding to its colorful origins: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between skirmishes with Indians; the society matrons who organized the first conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson, and the self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Also surveys the explosive growth of modern birding that began in 1934, when Roger Tory Peterson published ¿A Field Guide to the Birds.¿ Today birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive ¿listers¿ among its tens of millions of participants. ¿A spirited and compulsively readable popular history.¿ Illustrations.