T. Martin Trippe was an avid amateur ornithologist from Orange, New Jersey, who spent the majority of his free time as a teenager and young man exploring the woods and observing, shooting, and collecting birds. After graduating from New York University with a degree in engineering in 1869, Trippe worked in various positions for the Iowa Central, Northern Pacific, and Albia, Knoxville, and Des Moines Railroads, continuing to devote his spare time in the interests of ornithology. The two surviving volumes of Trippe's journals document his ornithological and natural historical observations between 1865 and 1871, including meticulously detailed records of the avifauna (and to lesser degree other fauna) in central New Jersey, central Iowa, and southern Minnesota. They include detailed, and Trippe provided year-end taxonomic and meteorological indexes for 1869, 1870, and 1871.