Burt, William 1948–

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Burt, William 1948–

PERSONAL:

Born 1948.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Old Lyme, CT. E-mail—wburt48@yahoo.com.

CAREER:

Naturalist, photographer, writer. Burt's photography has been displayed at museums in the United States and Canada, including the New Brunswick Museum, Calgary Science Center, Liberty Science Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Harvard Museum of Natural History.

WRITINGS:

Shadowbirds: A Quest for Rails, Lyons & Burford (New York, NY), 1994.

Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, Universe (New York, NY), 2001.

Marshes: The Disappearing Edens, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Smithsonian, National Wildlife, and Audubon.

SIDELIGHTS:

William Burt is a naturalist, photographer, and writer whose photographs are widely viewed in exhibitions across the United States and Canada. His books feature photographs of elusive birds, especially those that populate marshes, and his articles are featured in wildlife magazines. Many of his photographs can be viewed at his Web site.

His first volume, Shadowbirds: A Quest for Rails, documents Burt's quest for the black rail and the yellow rail, small shy birds that live in swamps and meadows. He documents his searches from the humid, insect-rich Dead Man's Swamp in Connecticut to the relatively friendly salt meadow marshes of Elliott Island, Maryland. His pursuit of the rails also took Burt to Manitoba, North Dakota, and Minnesota. Much of his inspiration comes from the lives of other birders, including Judge John N. Clark, who during the 1800s sought the black rail along the Connecticut River, and P.B. Peabody, who was an established expert on the yellow rail.

Smithsonian contributor Andrew Todhunter noted that in order to obtain his beautiful images, ‘Burt employs an other-worldly and ingenious rig of his invention. ‘The arrangement,’ he explains, ‘includes camera and autowinder and tele-macro lens and two heavy, potent flash units, main and fill, and big square diffusing screens to soften them; and a single microswitch to fire it all, and a flashlight to see and focus by, all assembled together upon a frame with struts and shoulder brace to make a single, solid, portable ‘studio."’’ The volume contains eight pages of color plates.

Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, which collects sixteen years of Burt's work, is a collection of essays that describe his searches for, and discoveries of, twenty birds, including rails, bitterns, and nocturnal nightjars. He describes the difficulties in finding and photographing birds that most birdwatchers are lucky to briefly glimpse and provides fifty-seven photographs of those he has captured on film. Booklist reviewer Nancy Bent called it ‘a quietly wonderful book."

Marshes: The Disappearing Edens includes ninety-two photographs taken by Burt in his visits to Great Island, Connecticut—where he wandered as a child—Texas, Louisiana, and other destinations. In the book that documents more than three decades of Burt's work, he decries threatened habitats, noting that more than eighty percent of all wetlands have been destroyed, while celebrating the beauty that remains.

Savannah Guz, on the Pittsburgh City Paper Web site, wrote a commentary on the traveling exhibition when it was featured at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The exhibition contains forty archivally pigmented inkjet prints, fewer than half of the number contained in the volume. Quotes by Burt, Henry David Thoreau, and naturalist Edward Howe Forbush enhance the exhibition, which is not confined to images of birds. Noted Guz: ‘Burt has also recorded the majesty of weather patterns, the seeming infinity of yawning marshland vistas, and the opulent sapphire of sky reflected in briny water. His images of cascading flowers and soft pliant grasses lying in wind-blown tousles all communicate a silent awe—a sense of wonder before the marshlands, and the invisible rhythms and patterns that shape the natural world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Audubon, September 2001, review of Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, p. 102; July 1, 2007, Andrea Anderson, review of Marshes: The Disappearing Edens, p. 101.

Booklist, May 1, 1994, Jon Kartman, review of Shadowbirds: A Quest for Rails, p. 1571; May 1, 1994, review of Shadowbirds, p. 1571; November 15, 2001, Nancy Bent, review of Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, p. 531.

Library Journal, May 15, 1994, Henry T. Armistead, review of Shadowbirds, p. 94; September 1, 2001, Henry T. Armistead, review of Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, p. 219.

Orion, July, 2007, Tim Traver, review of Marshes.

Publishers Weekly, April 4, 1994, review of Shadowbirds, p. 67; September 3, 2001, review of Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, p. 82; March 26, 2007, review of Marshes, p. 84.

SciTech Book News, March, 2002, review of Rare and Elusive Birds of North America, p. 171.

Smithsonian, December 1994, Andrew Todhunter, review of Shadowbirds, p. 148; December, 1994, review of Shadowbirds, p. 148.

Washington Times, August 19, 2007, Philip Kopper, review of Marshes.

Whole Earth Review, fall, 1995, Craig Childs, review of Shadowbirds, p. 119.