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,”[1] 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
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- ↑ Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
