First photo-illustrated nature book

Brothers Richard and Cherry Kearton (both UK) are considered among the earliest professional nature photographers, active in the late Victorian period. Their 1895 book British Birds' Nests: How, Where, and When to Find and Identify Them (Cassell and Company Ltd, London) – an A-Z reference guide for amateur birders and oologists (egg collectors) in the British Isles – was the very first natural-history book to be illustrated exclusively with photographs.

The Keartons are the first people to snap a wild bird's nest containing eggs: it was the nest of a song thrush (Turdus philomelos) containing a clutch of four eggs that was photographed in Boreham Wood in north London, UK, on 10 April 1892. This picture was the inspiration for the brothers to produce British Birds' Nests over the subsequent three years, and appears on p.299 under the listing for "song thrush".

Other books produced by the prolific Keartons were With Nature and a Camera (1898), Wild Life at Home (1899) and The Fairyland of Living Things (1907). In their early publications, Cherry was the principal photographer, while Richard was the main author. Cherry would later go on to film wildlife documentaries all around the world.

In their quest to photograph birds close-up in the wild, the brothers are also believed to have devised the first "portable hides", some of them more outlandish than others! They included a mobile pile of hay, fake rocks and tree trunks, and perhaps most bizarrely a full-sized hollowed-out ox commissioned from a taxidermist that a person with a camera could fit inside!