Birds and Trees of North America is Rex Brasher's seminal work, comprised of 862 watercolor paintings bound in an encyclopedic set. Between 1929 and 1932, he created 100 twelve-volume sets—1,200 individual books—and sent them to patrons across North America. Volume 11 contains 92 hand-colored plates, depicting warblers, wagtails, pipits, dippers, and thrashers.
Order, Passeres: suborder, Oscines; family, Motacillidae
Members of this family are terrestrial, walking or running instead of hopping and feeding on insects and seeds.
WAGTAILS are boldly colored and always unstreaked, only one species coming into Alaska from Asia.
PIPITS are streaked, resembling the Larks in plumage and habits. Out of eight species only two are found north of the Rio Grande.
Order, Passeres: suborder, Oscines; family, Cinclidae
This remarkable family comprises fourteen species, six American but only one north of Mexico.
They are allied to Wrens in physical characteristics, to Thrushes in musical ability and their aquatic habits sets them apart from all other perching birds.
They are extraordinarily happy birds, singing as blithely with feet in snow as when they tread the green moss of Spring.
Order, Passeres: suborder, Oscines; family, Mimidae
This American group contains our preeminent songsters — MOCKINGBIRD, BROWN THRASHER and CATBIRD.
The members of this family are strikingly, tho not, vividly colored and are among our most individualistic birds. Most of them express themselves volubly and have a conspicuous place in the bird kingdom.
Birds and Trees of North America is a vivid record of taxonomy in motion. The scientific and common names within these volumes do not always align with modern standards, nor do they always align with historical standards. While Rex followed the 1910 checklist of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), he occasionally deviated from it according to his own observations and convictions. He disagreed with the “hair-splitting fad” of systematists and the possessive form of bird names, yet maintained the necessity of a standard language for understanding the avian world. Where Rex intentionally diverged from standard classification, we have preserved his work in its original form.