Handbook to the Birds of the Bombay Presidency

Henry Edwin Barnes, Handbook to the Birds of the Bombay Presidency, Calcutta: The Calcutta Central Press Co., Ltd., 1885

pp. xxiv, 449, [2], xi; half-title; dedication “To Colonel Charles Swinhoe, F.L.S., F.Z.S.”; title with publisher’s address “5, Council House Street”; modern patterned cloth over boards with a tan morocco title panel gilt to the upper cover.
9.69 x 6.69 in (24.6 x 17 cm)

A BOMBAY PRESIDENCY ORNITHOLOGY: BARNES’S HANDBOOK, CALCUTTA 1885

Barnes’s Handbook is the first single-volume regional synopsis of the avifauna of the Bombay Presidency, intended, as the author states, to put a reliable identification guide “within the reach of all” and confined to the areas garrisoned by Bombay troops. It provides concise species accounts—diagnosis, range, habits and breeding notes—bridging the gap between Jerdon’s multi-volume Birds of India and later nationwide handbooks. Published in Calcutta in 1885 and dedicated to Col. Charles Swinhoe, a central figure of nineteenth-century Indian ornithology and leading light of the Bombay Natural History Society, the book reflects the era’s drive to organise natural history knowledge for administrators, officers and field naturalists. Contemporary notices in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society recommended it to “every good sportsman,” underscoring its period readership and practical scope. Today the work stands as a primary documentary source for regional distribution and nineteenth-century taxonomy in western India and as an antecedent to the later Fauna of British India “Birds” volumes and twentieth-century syntheses.

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