This book is titled "American Duck Shooting" by George Bird Grinnell, with fifty-eight portraits of North American Swans, Geese And Ducks by Edwin Sheppard and numerous vignettes by Wilmot Townshend in the text, and it's a first edition that was published in New York by Forest and Stream Publishing Company in 1901. The burgundy cloth is decorated with gilt lettering and gilt devices on the spine and gilt lettering and a beautiful gilt duck on the front cover, with blank endpapers, a frontis of a Canvasback from an Audubon plate, a tissue guard and the title page, the copyright date of 1901, a three-page Preface, five pages of Contents, a three-page List of Illustrations, the text runs from page 19 to page 616 and there's an eleven page Index after that, and the book is a cornerstone for the waterfowl hunter. George Bird Grinnell (1849 - 1938) was an American anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer who became a prominent conservationist and student of Native American life. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated from Yale and originally specialized in zoology, then had extensive contact with the terrain, animals and Native Americans of the northern plains, starting with being part of the last great hunt of the Pawnee in 1872. As a graduate student, he accompanied Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 Black Hills expedition as a naturalist, but declined a similar appointment to the ill-fated Little Big Horn expedition of 1876. In 1875, he was invited by Colonel William Ludlow to serve as naturalist and mineralogist on an expedition to Montana and the newly established Yellowstone Park. Ludlow had been part of Custer's gold exploration of the region, and Grinnell prepared an attachment to the expedition's report: Grinnell documented the poaching of buffalo, deer, elk and antelope for hides, and his experience in Yellowstone led him to write many magazine articles dealing with conservation, the protection of the buffalo, and the American West. In 1887, along with Theodore Roosevelt, Grinnell was a founding member of the Boone and Crockett Club, dedicated to the restoration of America's wildlands. Other founding members included the Civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman, and Grinnell also organized the first Audubon Society and was an organizer of the New York Zoological Society. Grinnell was later influential in establishing Glacier National Park in 1910, and Mount Grinnell in Glacier National Park in Montana is named after him, he was editor of Forest and Stream magazine from 1876 to 1911, and this book is a classic of American sport. His position as editor of the magazine gave him a great platform to promote wildlife preservation and conservation in the American west. The book is 8vo. and measures 9 x 6 1/4 in. wide, with a tight binding, clean pages and text, the illustrations are clean as well, and there are bumps on the heel and crown on the spine, light rubbing on the edges of the spine and at the tips, and two tips are turned in. A cornerstone book for the waterfowl hunter written by someone who hunted game, yet cherished wildlife and nature, and a scarce first edition of this book. #121 #1659