Hunting and collecting have long been obsessions among the wealthy,whether it be Egyptian pharaohs fowling in the marshes and filling their tombs with artifacts, Inca chiefs with their menageries, or early modern Europeans like Ole Worm and Francis Willughby cramming their cabinets with curiosities. The obsession with bird collecting in the 1800s and 1900s was a continuation of this trend but much more widespread, because by this date, a higher proportion of people in Europe had the wealth and time to collect. Both then and now, acquisition and accumulation often reflected deeprooted cravings for status.
打猎和收藏长久以来都是富人们的狂热爱好，无论是在沼泽捕鸟又用大量器物随葬的埃及法老、豢养珍禽异兽的印加酋长，还是奥勒·沃姆、弗朗西斯·威勒比这些把奇珍异宝塞满自家陈列柜的早期现代欧洲人，都乐此不疲。19到20世纪的鸟类收藏狂热是这种风潮的延续，只不过范围大大扩展了，因为到那时，有钱有闲投入鸟类收藏的欧洲人比例已有所增长。无论今昔，购置和囤积往往体现了人们对于彰显地位根深蒂固的渴望。
Through the 1700s, easier travel and better firearms encouraged the collecting of wildlife. By the start of the 1800s, the making of collections–of bird skins and birds' eggs-had become increasingly popular. This was how ornithology was done at the time:Having a specimen to examine, measure, keep and refer back to whenever necessary was the essence of scientific bird study. Birds were shot (with dust shot for small birds), skinned and prepared as a "study skin"(rather than a lifelike mounted specimen) that would fit tidily inside a cabinet drawer.
在整个18世纪，交通改善、火器改进促进了野生动物收藏。到19世纪初，鸟皮和鸟蛋等收藏品的制作日益流行。鸟类学研究当时是这样进行的：拥有可供检视、测量、保存并能随时查阅的标本，正是鸟类科学研究的核心。鸟类被射杀（小型鸟类用尘弹）剥皮，制作成能整齐收纳进陈列柜抽屉内的“研究标本”（而不是栩栩如生的立体标本）。
Like other 19th-century ornithologists, Edmund Selous killed birds to study them. But in June 1898, when Selous was 40 years old, he had an epiphany while watching a pair of European nightjars.
跟19世纪其他鸟类学家一样，埃德蒙·塞卢斯也曾为了研究而猎杀鸟类。但1898年6月他40岁时，在观察一对欧洲夜鹰的过程中，塞卢斯突然明白了什么。
Magical and enigmatic, the nightjar's perfectly patterned plumage provides exquisite camouflage while it's on the ground, as Selous discovered as he stared out from his hide (a sheltered hiding place). He knew there was a bird incubating in front of him, but it took over an hour before he "finally became convinced it was the bird and not a piece of fir-bark at which I was looking;and this though I knew the eggs to be there." Thrilled by what he had seen, he wrote in an observational diary, "I must confess that I once belonged to this great, poor army of killers, though, happily, a bad shot, a most fatigable collector, and a poor half-hearted bungler',generally. But now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible." He continued:The pleasure that belongs to observation and inference is, really, far greater than that which attends any kind of skill or dexterity, even when death and pain add their zest to the latter. Let anyone who has an eye and a brain (but especially the latter), lay down the gun and take up the glasses [opera glasses, or proto-binoculars] for a week, a day,even for an hour, if he is lucky, and he will never wish to change back again.He will soon come to regard the killing of birds as not only brutal, but dreadfully silly, and his gun and cartridges, once so dear, will be to him, hereafier, as the toys of childhood are to the grown man.
塞卢斯从一个隐蔽的藏身处向外观察时发现，奇妙而神秘的夜鹰，其羽毛纹理十分巧妙，在地上成为一种绝佳伪装。塞卢斯知道眼前有一只鸟在孵蛋，却花了一个多小时才“总算确定我看到的是一只鸟，而不是一块冷杉树皮，尽管我清楚鸟蛋就在那儿”。见此情景，塞卢斯满心触动，在观察日记里写道：“必须承认，我曾经也是那支庞大而可悲的猎杀队伍中的一员。所幸，我枪法糟糕，搞收藏又最怕受累，总的来说是个三心二意、办事没请的可怜虫。可如今近距离顺象这些鸟儿之后，杀害它们对我而言就显得残忍而恐怖。”他继续写道：
观察和推理所产生的愉悦，其实远胜过任何技术或绝活带来的快感，即便后者困死亡和痛苦而多了些刺激。凡是具备眼力与头脑（尤其是后者）的人，只要放下猎枪、拿起望远镜（观剧镜或者原型双筒镜），经过一周、一天，甚至一小时（如果他运气好的话之后，他就再也不愿重拾猎枪了。很快，他就会觉得猎杀鸟类非但残忍，更是愚蠢透顶；曾经视若珍宝的猎枪和子弹，此后对他而言，就像是成年人眼中的儿时玩具。
Selous made empathy for birds respectable and, in doing so, changed the world. Bird-watching became one of the most popular pastimes globally,eventually making birding scientific and playing a pivotal role in the animals'conservation. Dispassionate killing was gradually displaced in favor of a gentler,more intimate approach whose aim was to better understand the nature of a bird's world. It was a shift enhanced,naturally, by the appearance of decenit binoculars, which in the early 1900s enabled watchers to observe birds from a distance without disturbing them.
塞卢斯让爱鸟理念受到推崇，也因此改变了世界。观鸟成为风靡全球的消遣方式之一，最终使观鸟研究科学化，并对鸟类保护起到了关键作用。冷漠猎杀逐渐被一种更温和、更亲近的方式取代，后者的目的是更好地理解鸟类世界的本质。当然，这一转变得益于性能良好的双简望远镜问世，让20世纪初的观鸟者能从远处观察鸟类而不惊扰到它们。
As the interest in watching birds rather than shooting them increased, a view espoused by ornithologist Max Nicholson came to dominate the field.Nicholson believed that bird-watching should be "useful," and he wanted birdwatchers to direct their energies toward an even greater understanding of birds'behaviors, especially in terms of their numbers—and so started the practice of monitoring bird populations.
随着公众对观鸟（而非猎鸟）的兴趣越发浓厚，鸟类学家马克斯·尼科尔森倡导的一个观点逐渐主导了该领域。尼科尔森认为，观鸟应当是“有实用价值的”。他希望观鸟者把精力用于更深入地理解鸟类行为，尤其是鸟类的数量——鸟类种群监测的实践由此应运而生。
A second boost to bird-watching came in 1940, in the early days of the Second World War, with James Fisher's Watching Birds, a book that eventually sold over a million copies and which, in its introduction, emphasized the variety of people then engaged in the hobby. For those directly involved in the war, watching birds was a welcome distraction during the long, boring intervals between fighting.
观鸟的第二波热潮出现在1940年，也就是第二次世界大战初期。这一年詹姆斯·费希尔出版了《观鸟》一书。这本书最终销量突破百万。该书的序言特别强调，当时各种各样的人都热衷于这项爱好。对于战争的直接参与者来说，在漫长而枯燥的战事间隙，观鸟成了一项颇受欢迎的消遣。
One of the servicemen who took solace in birds was John Buxton, who had served as warden of Skokholm Bird Observatory in 1939 with his wife Marjorie. Captured in Norway in May 1940,Buxton spent the rest of the war in various prison camps, where he encouraged fellow inmates to watch and record the behavior of the different birds they could see. From his camp,Buxton wrote to Erwin Stresemann,Germany's leading ornithologist, who in a wonderful gesture of collegiality responded by sending books and bird bands (rings placed around a bird's leg to help identify them) to help with their studies. A true scholar-he had been partway through a graduate degree at Oxford at the outbreak of war-Buxton subsequently transformed the mass of notes accumulated by his fellow prisoners into a monograph on the common redstart that was published in 1950.
在鸟类身上寻得慰藉的军人中，有一位名叫约翰·巴克斯顿。1939年，他曾与妻子玛乔丽一同担任斯科霍姆鸟类观测站的管理员。1940年5月，巴克斯顿在挪威被俘，余下的战争岁月里，他辗转于多座战俘营。其间，他鼓励狱友们观察并记录能见到的不同鸟类的行为。他还从战俘营给德间顶尖鸟类学家欧文·斯特雷泽曼写了信。后者回以惺惺相情的美意，寄去了书籍和鸟类环志（套在鸟腿上用于识别的金属环），为他们的研究提供帮助。巴克斯顿本就是位真正的学者：战争爆发时，他正在牛津大学攻读研究生学位。后来，他根据狱友们积累的大量观测笔记撰写出一部关于普通红尾够的专著，并于1950年出版。
Once the war was over, interest in birds metamorphosed from a "comparatively rare eccentricity into a national pastime," according to a 2007 history in the journal British Birds. As it did so, two increasingly distinct strands that Nicholson would have identified as either purposeful (censusing) or aimless(birding)—started to emerge: surveys versus listing, or keeping a list of every bird the watcher has seen."
据《英国鸟类》期刊2007年的一篇历史类文章所言，二战结束后，观鸟兴趣从相对小众的另类爱好转变为一项全民消遣”。与此同时，两个愈加清晰的分支逐渐显露出来：一个是鸟类调查，另一个是观鸟名录（列出观鸟者见过的每一只鸟）——尼科尔森应该会将两者区分为有目的性的鸟类普查和无目的性的观鸟。
In the 1800s and early 1900s, only the wealthy could afford a serious interest in birds. Even in the 1950s, birdwatching continued to be dominated by those "that held sway in most departments of cultural life" in Britain. But by the 1970s and '80s, as interest in birds continued to expand, most birders "came from the same broad social background the working and middle classes."
在19世纪和20世纪初，只有富人才负担得起像样的观鸟爱好。即便在1950年代,在英国的观鸟活动中占主导地位的仍是那些“在大多数文化生活领域举足轻重的人群”。但到了1970至1980年代，随着观鸟热潮持续蔓延，大多数观鸟者“来自相似的社会阶层，即工人阶级与中产阶级”。
Over succeeding decades, birding became more genteel. The days of skulking in the undergrowth with binoculars are a thing of the past, for most birders today are conveyed along wooden boardwalks toward cozy hides to watch birds in comfort. Since the 1960s, the ongoing expansion of higher education across much of the world has resulted in more and more women taking university courses in biology and zoology and becoming professional ornithologists.
在之后的几十年里，观鸟活动渐渐变得讲究起来。手持双筒望远镜在灌木丛里潜伏观鸟的日子已成为过去时，如今多数观鸟人会循着木质栈道去到舒适的观鸟屋，在惬意的环境中观赏鸟类。从1960年代开始，世界上不少地区的高等教育持续发展，越来越多的女性选择生物学、动物学等大学课程，并成为专业的鸟类学家。
However, as the number of people interested in birds has boomed, the number of birds worldwide has steadily declined,in large part due to habitat loss and overexploitation. More and more people are in search of fewer and fewer birds. The good news is that the increase in the number of birders, together with stunning technological developments like online database eBird and migration tracking project ICARUS, are transforming many different forms of birding, giving them purpose and enhancing our knowledge of bird biology on a scale no one could have imagined even 20 years ago.
然而，爱鸟队伍迅速壮大，全球鸟类数量却在持续下降，很大一部分原因是栖息地丧失和过度开发。越来越多的人在追寻越来越少的鸟。好消息是，观鸟人数的增长，加上在线数据库eBird、迁徙追踪计划ICARUS等卓越的技术进展，正在改变许多观鸟方式，为它们赋予了使命，并提升了我们对鸟类生物学的认知，提升幅度之大20年前无人能够想象。
（译者为“《英语世界》杯”翻译大赛获奖者）
