The Birds of the District of Geelong, Australia is a book published in 1914 by W.J. Griffiths in Geelong, Victoria

Geelong, Victoria

Geelong is a port city located on Corio Bay and the Barwon River, in the state of Victoria, Australia, south-west of the state capital; Melbourne. It is the second most populated city in Victoria and the fifth most populated non-capital city in Australia...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Authored by Charles Frederic Belcher

Charles Frederic Belcher

Sir Charles Frederic Belcher OBE was an Australian lawyer, author, British colonial jurist and amateur ornithologist.For much of his life he served the British Colonial Service in Africa and elsewhere. In 1930, he was appointed Chief Justice of Trinidad and Tobago, an office he held for the next...

, it was published in octavo

Octavo

Octavo to is a technical term describing the format of a book.Octavo may also refer to:* Octavo is a grimoire in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett...

 format (225 x 144 mm), containing 414 pages bound in navy blue buckram. It is illustrated with numerous black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 photographic plates. It contains a systematic list of 244 bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 species known to occur within a radius of 56 km (34.8 mi) from the city of Geelong, south-west of Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

 on the western side of Port Phillip

Port Phillip

Port Phillip Port Phillip Port Phillip (also commonly referred to as Port Phillip Bay or (locally) just The Bay, is a large bay in southern Victoria, Australia; it is the location of Melbourne. Geographically, the bay covers and the shore stretches roughly . Although it is extremely shallow for...

Bay, followed by largely personal reminiscences on the birdlife. The author says in his Preface:

”This book is not a scientific treatise, but merely the outcome of a personal desire, which I have long cherished, to give some permanent and orderly form to the odd notes, jottings, and recollections of some five-and-twenty years upon the birds inhabiting the district lying about my native town of Geelong. If my own satisfaction comes first, it can only be increased by the feeling that at the same time I am passing on to those who are already lovers of birds the fruits of my experience, scanty as these may be, and also that my little book may be the means of communicating to the general reader something of that enduring charm and delight which from childhood I have found in the observation of wild birds.”

The book was published when the author was only 28 years old. He went on to become a distinguished British colonial jurist who lived into his nineties.