VLEK R (2011) Snouckaert's legacy: 100 years of the Club van Nederlandse Vogelkundigen. LIMOSA 84 (2): 50-60.

This paper describes the contributions of the Club van Nederlandse Vogelkundigen (CNV, 'Club of Dutch Ornithologists') to Dutch ornithology. The Club was founded 100 years ago in May 1911 after debate within the Dutch Ornithological Society (Nederlandsche Ornithologische Vereeniging (NOV, founded 1901) about new and stricter bird protection legislation, to be adopted by the Dutch parliament in 1912. Bird collectors with a private collection were not satisfied with the new restrictions on shooting and egg-collecting. Although the new legislation included a license system allowing collecting for scientific purposes, some collectors found it a form of "exaggerated bird protection" and much too restrictive for scientific ornithological research.
      Among them the president of the NOV, R. Baron Snouckaert van Schauburg, an avid bird collector, who resigned from his post, left the NOV and founded a new ornithological club with people with the same background and interest in private collecting. The CNV published a new journal, 'Jaarbericht Club van Nederlandsche Vogelkundigen', which is the predecessor of the Dutch ornithological journal Limosa. With Snouckaert as it's first president, the Club developed from a small group of bird hunters (many from the lower nobility) into a serious and productive association for ornithological research. Its main research fields were avifaunistical research at the regional and national level, colonial ornithology especially in the East-Indies, and taxonomic research into taxa of the Dutch avifauna. During some 60 years the Club published several innovative books and papers in these fields, among which the Handbook 'De Nederlandsche Vogels' (3 volumes, 1937-1949), and several of its members donated important private bird collections to Dutch zoological museums (now in NCB Naturalis, Leiden).
      In 1957 the Club merged back with the NOV to form the Netherlands Ornithological Union (NOU). Since then the Club has existed as an autonomous section within the NOU. Dutch colonial ornithology came more or less to an end with the Independence of Indonesia (1945) and Surinam (1975). After 1980, when a new generation of Dutch ornithologists emerged, two new organisations, SOVON Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology and the Dutch Birding Association, gradually replaced the Club in leading ornithological research in the Netherlands, in areas such as avifaunistics, population monitoring and taxonomy.

[pdf only for members] [dutch summary]