Amateurs and professionals studying birds at the end of the 19th century were a contentious, passionate group with goals that intersected, collided, and occasionally merged in their writings and organizations. Driven by a desire to advance science, as well as by ego, pride, honor, insecurity, religion, and other clashing sensibilities, they struggled to absorb the implications of evolution after Darwin. In the process, they dramatically reshaped the study of birds. Author Daniel Lewis, the Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology, at The Huntington Library, in California, has written a biography of one of ornithology’s key figures, Robert Ridgway, the Smithsonian’s first curator of birds and one of North America’s most important natural scientists. Lewis offers readers a world in which the uses of language, classification, and accountability between amateurs and professionals played essential roles. He also explores the inner workings of the Smithsonian and the role of collectors working in the field and reveals previously unknown details of the ornithological journal The Auk and the untold story of the color dictionaries for which Ridgway is known. Lewis, former corporate archivist for the Los Angeles Times, is also the author of Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World.