TO THE READER.
Do you want to know the birds and call them by their familiar names? You may do so if you will, provided you have keen eyes and a pocket full of patience; patience is the salt of the bird-catching legend.
The flowers silently await your coming, from the wayside wild rose to the shy orchid entrenched in the depths of the cool bog, and you may examine and study them at your leisure. With the birds it is often only a luring call, a scrap of melody, and they are gone. Yet in spite of this you may have a bowing and even a speaking acquaintance with them.
The way is plain for those who wish to study the science of ornithology and have time to devote to the pursuit; its literature is exhaustive, and no country offers a more interesting variety of species than our own. But for the novice, who wishes to identify easily the birds that surround him, to recognize their songs and give them their English names, the work at first seems difficult. There are many scientific terms, containing their own definitions, that lose force and exactness when translated into simpler language, requiring a dozen words to give the meaning of one. There is a comforting fact, however, for the novice, that while scientific nomenclature has been and is constantly changing, the common names, that science also recognizes, remain practically unchanged. Our Bluebird bears the same name as in Audubon’s day, and the Meadowlark, who has been moved from one genus to another, is called the Meadowlark still.
In speaking of the common names of birds, I would draw a sharp line between the English names recognized by the text books and the American Ornithologists’ Union, and the purely local titles. Local names, Whether of flowers or birds, are often a hindrance to exact knowledge, because they frequently stand for more than one object. For example, I have heard the term Redbird applied alike to the Baltimore Oriole, Scarlet Tanager, and cardinal; but a, knowledge of the recognized common names of a bird will enable the student to find its species in any of the manuals.
Allowing that you wish to name the birds, do not be held back by minor considerations. You are not to be excluded from the pleasures of this acquaintance even if you are obliged to spend most of your life in the city. The bird-quest will lend a new attraction to your holidays, and you will be led toward the nearest park or along the front of river or harbour. Bradford Torrey gives, in his inimitable way, an account of the birds (some seventy species) which he saw on Boston Common, and Frank M. Chapman lists one hundred and thirty odd species which he has seen in Central Park, New York.[1]
The museums also are open to you, and their treasury of skilfully preserved birds offers the advantage of close inspection. The taxidermist’s art has reached great perfection lately, and in the place of bird mummies, stuffed and mounted each in the stiff attitude of its neighbour, without the tribal marks of pose or expression,—as much alike as the four-and-twenty blackbirds that were baked in the pie,—we now see the birds as individuals in their homes. The American Museum of Natural History, New York, has sixty such bird groups which show the Chimney Swift, nesting on his little bracket, the Ruffed Grouse rustling through the leaves with her tiny brown chicks, the Baltimore Oriole and its swinging nest, or the Black Duck guarding its bed of marsh-grass. We Americans have not yet thoroughly acquired the habit of regarding the museums as great picture books, and yet such they are, and in this connection I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. J. A. Allen, Curator of the Department of Birds and Mammals of the American Museum of Natural History, for much valuable assistance and advice in connection with this book.
If you are not a dweller in a large city, but live in a suburban town with a few shrubs in your yard or a vine over your door, you have the wherewithal to entertain bird guests who will talk to you so cheerily that you will soon be led to discover that there is a lane or a bit of woods within walking distance, where you may hear more of such delightful conversation. Read the “Bird Songs about Worcester,”[2] by the late Harry Leverett Nelson, a graphic as well as charming account of the birds to be found in the neighbourhood of a rural city, and you will be encouraged.
And you who through circumstance, rather than choice perhaps, live in the real country and, as yet, feel the isolation more than the companionableness of Nature, who love the flowers in a way, but find them irresponsive, I beg of you to join this quest. You will discover that you have neighbours enough, friends for all your moods, silent, melodious, or voluble; friends who will gossip with you, and yet bear no idle tales.
If you wish to go on this pleasant quest, you must take with you three things,—a keen eye, a quick ear, and loving patience. The vision may be supplemented by a good field-glass, and the ear quickened by training, but there is no substitute for intelligent patience. A mere dogged persistency will not do for the study of the living bird, and it is to the living bird in his love-songs, his house-building, his haunts, and his migrations, that I would lead you. The gun that silences the bird voice, and the looting of nests, should be left to the practised hand of science; you have no excuse for taking life, whether actual or embryonic, as your very ignorance will cause useless slaughter, and the egg-collecting fever of the average boy savours more of the greed of possession than of ornithological ardour.
Finally, Whoever you are who read these pages, spare for me a little of your hoard of the same patience with which you are to study the birds, if, while striving to lead you through the wood-path, I often stumble or retrace my steps.
- ↑ Mr. Chapman, Assistant Curator of the Department of Birds and Mammals of the Museum of Natural History, has recently completed an excellent Visitor’s Guide to the Museum’s collection of Birds, found within fifty miles of New York City, in which all birds seen in Central Park are specially noted.
- ↑ Boston: Little, Brown & Co.