Virginia Holmgren

Ohio-born, Virginia Holmgren moved to Portland, Oregon, with her husband (a mining engineer with the U.S. Forest Service) in 1956, and in 1960 Virginia began writing articles on birds for The Sunday Oregonian, a series she continued for 22½ years, while doing other writing for books and magazine publications. On her first visit to Fort Clatsop (the 1805—1806 winter establishment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) she saw birds she had never had the chance to know during her many years of birding east of the Rocky Mountains, and she wondered if Lewis and Clark had mentioned these new species in their journals. She purchased the Lippincott non-annotated edition of the 1814 Biddle-Allen text or paraphrase based on the origin al manuscript journals of the explorers. She was misled by the word “unabridged” on the cover of the Lippincott edition. Using this text she indexed every reference to birds. Later, she discovered the gaps in this supposedly complete text, and checked with the Thwaites edition of the original journals, the 1893 Coues edition, an annotated reprint of the 1814 Biddle-Allen narrative, the works of Paul R. Cutright, Donald Jackson, and Ken Walcheck’s natural history article in Montana Outdoors (July-August 1976).

Since many of the birds in the journals are described but not named—or named with labels no longer in use—she identified them with the same system she developed for identifying birds in the wild. Virginia calls this her SCANS system—with SCANS an acronym for the five clue points: Size, Colors, Actions, Notes, Setting. The use of this system is explained in one of her 32 published books, SCANS Key to Bird Watching, Timber Press, Beaverton, Oregon, 1983.

Although she is no longer writing for The Oregonian, she is a frequent contributor to Bird Watcher’s Digest, which published her briefer article on Lewis and Clark Expedition birds in the September-October 1983 issue. She has also published under her maiden name, Virginia Cunningham. She holds a B.S. degree (and a Phi Beta Kappa key) from Ohio State University, and an M.A. degree from Northwestern. In her home on a wooded Oregon hillside, she continues to watch birds, read, and write. Among her books of special interest to birders and historians is Bird Walk Through The Bible, Seabury Press, 1972.