Stray Leaves from Nature's Notebook. by Turner, E. L - 1929

London: Country Life Ltd, 1929. Quarto. Original green cloth backed aqua boards, titles to spine and upper board in brown. Frontispiece and 23 plates from photographs by the author. Wear to the ends of the spine and board edges, spine browned, boards rubbed and dulled, spotting and offsetting to contents. A good copy. First edition, first impression of this uncommon work by the pioneering bird photographer and conservationist Emma Louise Turner (1867-1940). The contents Turner became interested in wildlife photography after meeting Richard Kearton in 1900. She joined the Royal Photographic Society the following year, and by 1904 was giving talks illustrated with her own slides. Turner was particularly interested in birds and travelled throughout the UK and in Europe to photograph them, but her main base of operations was in the Norfolk Broads, where she lived for part of each year beginning as early as 1901. This was where, in 1911, she photographed a nestling bittern, proving that the species was breeding in Britain for the first time since 1886. Another highlight of her career was the award of the Royal Photographic Society's Gold Medal for a photograph of a great crested grebe on its nest, published in her book Broadland Birds in 1924. In 1904 Turner was elected one of the first fifteen female members of the Linnean Society, in 1909 she became one of the first four honorary female members of the British Ornithologist's Union, and she was the only woman involved in the 1933 appeal that led to the creation of the British Trust for Ornithology.