520 



FISHERY BULLETIN OF THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE 



count to the available space, it has been necessary 

 to use a summary written in telegraphic style. 



There is a fourth group of birds whose distribu- 

 tion is affected by the Gulf of Mexico. These are 

 the land birds of the Gulf islands. This group, 

 however, is so large and so varied that it must be 

 considered beyond the scope of this chapter. 



Illustrations and condensed field marks for all 

 of the birds included in these categories, except a 

 few species occurring in western Cuba and on the 

 coast of Mexico, are to be found in Peterson 

 (1947). The Cuban species are concisely de- 

 scribed in Bond (1936, 1947), and the Mexican 

 species are among the birds briefly discussed by 

 Sutton (1951). The several volumes of The Birds 

 of North and Middle America (Ridgway 1901-19; 

 Ridgway and Friedmarm 1941, 1946; Friedmann 

 1950) offer the best technical keys and technical 

 descriptions available for identifying a specimen 

 in the hand. When completed, this work will 

 include all of the birds of the Gulf of Mexico. 

 Unfortunately several important orders, including 

 such birds as the ducks, herons, ibises, pelicans, 

 boobies, shearwaters, and petrels remain to be 

 treated. Meanwhile, most of the gaps may be 

 filled by recourse to the older keys in Ridgway 

 (1900). The revision of Pratt's Manual of the 

 Vertebrates, now in course of preparation, will 

 also provide keys to all the birds of the Gulf that 

 occur in the United States. 



In preparing the distributional summaries con- 

 tained in this paper, we have drawn freely on the 

 published and unpublished work of many orni- 

 thologists. To include references for every quoted 

 item would not only seriously lengthen the text 

 but would interfere with its continuity. Many 

 recent data relating to the birds of the Gulf have 

 been taken from the appropriate sections of Bird- 

 Lore's The Season, and its successor Audubon 

 Field Notes (Weston 1924-48; Davis 1936-40; 

 Williams 1941-51; Brookfield 1949-51; Lowery 

 and Newman 1949-51). Most of the remaining 

 published data included here, unless otherwise 

 accredited, are to be found in the following works: 

 Cuban records in Barbour (1943) and Bond (1936, 

 1950); Florida records in Howell (1932); Alabama 

 records in Howell (1924); Mississippi records in 

 Burleigh (1944); Louisiana records in Oberholser 

 (1938); Texas records in Griscom and Crosby 

 (1925-26); Mexican records in Friedmann et al. 

 (1950), and Sutton (1951). 



We wish to express particular thanks to Fred 

 M. Packard and Mrs. Conger Hagar and to Dr. 

 Frederick W. Loetscher, Jr., for permission to 

 consult their splendid manuscripts dealing re- 

 spectively with the birds of the central Texas 

 coast and with the ornithology of Veracruz. 

 The first draft of the present paper was mimeo- 

 graphed, and copies were sent to more than 30 

 zoologists, each of whom is intimately acquainted 

 with the bird life or the marine ecology of one or 

 more sections of the Gulf's periphery. In re- 

 sponse, a wealth of critical suggestions and of 

 useful data drawn from unpublished notes was 

 received from the following: Ellinor H. Behre, 

 H. J. Bennett, James Bond, Charles M. Brook- 

 field, Jas. Hy. Bruns, Harvey R. Bullis, Thomas 

 D. Burleigh, L. Irby Davis, Herbert Friedmann, 

 Gordon Gunter, R. C. Hallman, Joseph M. 

 Heiser, Julian A. Howard, Frederick C. Lincoln, 

 John Lynch, Merriam L. Miles, Robert C. 

 Murphy, Harry C. Oberholser, Raymond A. 

 Paynter, Jr., J. H. Roberts, Chandler Robbins, 

 Alexander Sprunt, George M. Sutton, Henry M. 

 Stevenson, Herbert Stoddard, Robert W. Storer, 

 J. Van Tyne, Francis M. Weston, A. Wetmore, and 

 George G. Williams. Without the information 

 obtained from these sources, a much less balanced 

 picture of the bird life of the Gulf coast would 

 have resulted. 



I. OFFSHORE BIRDS 



The birds of any ocean that seem most truly its 

 own are those so perfectly adjusted to a life on 

 the open sea that they cannot long survive away 

 from it. Although they usually live on or over the 

 water, rather than in it, such birds form a direct 

 adjunct to the pelagial community. They vari- 

 ously derive their sustenance from food chains 

 that begin with the diatoms and brown algae of 

 the lighted upper stratum of the sea, and, when 

 they die, their bodies return to the water to aid in 

 maintaining its fertility. In some ecologic classi- 

 fications of sea birds, a distinction is made be- 

 tween species that chiefly inhabit the surface of 

 the Neritic Province, above the continental 

 shelf, and those commonly found out over the 

 deeper water of the true Oceanic Province. In 

 the present state of our knowledge of Gulf orni- 

 thology, such a distinction is scarcely profitable or 

 practicable. For the purposes of this summary, 

 the primary group of sea birds will be called 



