View Fred Lesher's Journals

Fred Lesher's Birding Journals

Online

Fred is a long time member of CRAS and retired UW Lacrosse professor. He has donated his birding journals to the Murphy Library at UWL. The journals cover his lifetime of birding from 1957 to 2004. The 14 volumes are now housed in the Special Collections unit of the Library. All the volumes have been scanned and are available to the public in the Library’s digital collection. To view the journals go to the UWL website, click on Murphy Library then Special Collections then Digital Collections then Browse Digital Collections (or click here and use the "Sub-collections" window). When viewing the journals there are 2 pages on each scanned image so page numbers and scan numbers do not agree. 

Take some time this winter to explore some of Fred’s old haunts. Find the story about his favorite roads in Vernon County or his tame Barred Owl from his college days or his detailed observations of his Purple Martin house or his chronicle of Cooper’s Hawk nestlings. Enjoy his old fashion journaling skills; recall that he was an English professor. 

CRAS has taken on the challenge to transpose all the data in Fred’s journals to eBird. At this point we have entered 414 pages of the 3028 pages in the journals generating 286 eBird checklists. We have also created a spreadsheet of all the locations Fred reports in his journals. We need volunteers for the eBird project and have checked out from the Library Volumes 4 – 8 to work on this winter. If you use eBird you would find it a relatively straight forward process especially now that eBird Reviewers can cross reference checklists directly with the original documents. If you are interested in working on this project contact Paul Hayes at pjhayes@mwt.net ( notice it is a .net) http://digitalcollections.uwlax.edu/jsp/RcWebSearchResults.jsp