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184 Tile CONDOR Vol. xvI THE CONDOI A bfagazlne of ?trestern Ornitholog? Poblished Bi-Monthly by the Cooper Ornltholo#ical Club J. GRINNELL, Editor, Berkeley. C?liforaia HARRY S. SWARTH. Associate E?itor J EVGENE LAW ?. LEE CHAMBERS ? Business ?agars Hollywood, California: Published July 25, 1914 SUDSCI?IPTION RATES One Dollar and Fifty Cents per Year in the United States, Canacta, Mexico and U.S. Colonies, payable in advance Thirty Cents the single copy, One Dollar and Seventy-five Cents per Year in all other countries in the International Postal Union. COOPER CLUB DUES Two Dollars per year for members residing in the United States. Two Dollars and Twenty-five Cents in all other countries. Claims for missing or imperfect numbers should be made within thirty days of date of issue. Subscriptions and Excl?nges should be sent to the Business Manager. Mu. nuserlpts for publle?tion. and Books and F&pars for review, should be sent to the ?ditor. Advertising Rates on application. EDITORIAL NOTES AND NEWS As the regular meetings of the two Divi- sions of t?.e Cooper Ornithological Club are, with rare exceptions, held at the same places and at the same time, month after month, it seemed advisable to have a notice in each number of TIrE CONDOR calling atten- tion to the fact. In this way out-of-town members who do not receive notices of the meetings, if occasionally in a position to at- tend, will have at hand the necessary in- formation. Accordingly there will be found in this issue and in succeeding numbers, a brief statement of the usual place and time of meetings of the two Divisions, together with instructions as to ways of reaching the places. See page 192. We wish to call attention to, and empha- size the importance of, careful note-taking on the part of all students of natural his- tory. Even the merest beginner in bird study should at once put into operation some adequate and lasting system of recording his field observations. Unfortunately, a? point- ed out by Mr. A. Brazier Howell in his forceful "Plea", in the present issue of TIrE CONDOR, there are well-known ornithologists who have been lamentably careless in this duty. In certain instances much of the value of a life-time of gifted effort has been lost to our science because of failure to keep up, in permanent form, a daily record of ob- servations and inferences. The Oregon ?ortsman for June, 1914, under the editorship of Mr. William L. Fin- ley, stigmatizes the common house eat as the "greatest enemy of the birds." We heartily concur in this statement, and take the liberty of quoting the following aphor- isms from the same live exponent of conser- vation. The cat is the arch enemy of all song and game birds. Cats probably destroy more birds than all other animffis combined. In one case a "family owned a cat which was well cared for and a particular pet. They watched it through one season and found that it killed fifty-eight birds, including the young in five nests." The boy with the air gun is not in the same class with the eat. Why arrest a man for killing one bird and allow a cat to kill fifty? As a general rule a good cat is a dead cat. Always kill the stray cat. The California Museum of Vertebrate Zoology has been represented in field work this season as follows: Mr. H. C. Bryant, with J. N, Kendall as 'assistant, put in the month from May 11 to June 11 in exploring the breeding grounds of ducks within the state of California from Merced County to the Oregon line. All sorts of information was gatkited, and efforts were made to se- cure censuses of the various species in given areas, A special paper is in preparation by Bryant summarizing the results of his trip. Mr. Chase Littlejohn spent a like period in similar work in the vicinity of Eagle Lake, Laszen County. With the rapid settling up ?f the country, it has seemed highly desir- able that special efforts be expended in the directions above indicated. The Museum is fortunate in having been provided through private gift with the means enabling it to work along this line. One of the objects in view is the publication of a popular book on the game birds of California, to appear un- der the authorship of Grinnell and Bryant. At the Thirty-second Stated Meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union, held in Washington, D.C., April 6 to 9, 1914, the fol- lowing committees (for the 1915 meeting in California) were appointed. Au(liting: Jos- eph Mailliard, Louis A. Fuertes, Waiter K. Fisher. Arrahgements: Joseph Mailliard, Joseph Grinnell, Walter K. Fisher. Commu- nications: Waiter K. Fisher, Joseph Grin- nell, Joseph Mailliard. Mr. Alfred C. Shelton was appointed in February last, field collector in the depart- ment of zoology of the University of Oregon. His duties consist in gathering birds and mammals for a departmental museum and in participating in the biological survey of Oregon now being conducted under the joint auspices of the University of Oregon, the