How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts

The Nature Fakers controversy, also called the “War of the Naturalists,” was an early 20th-century American debate over sentimentality versus accuracy in nature writing. The controversy was kicked off in 1903 when naturalist and writer John Burroughs published his article “Real and Sham Natural History” in The Atlantic Monthly, lambasting popular nature writers for their overly anthropomorphic depictions of wildlife and denouncing the genre of realistic animal fiction as the “yellow journalism of the woods.”

Robert Williams Wood, inspired by the nature fakers controversy, published How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers: A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners in 1907, followed by Animal Analogues in 1908. The books collect illustrated poems comparing plants and animals with similar names, satirizing the uninformed, anthropomorphized style of nature writing. The Nature Fakers controversy is referenced most explicitly in his poem “The Yellow‑hammer; The Saw‑fish.”

In 1917, the books were combined into How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts: A Revised Manual of Flornithology for Beginners. The revised edition included two new poems, removed four poems from Animal Analogues, and revised the text and illustrations of a number of others. This Standard Ebooks edition restores the missing poems from Animal Analogues.