THE NEW STUDY OF BIRDS 



well remember the time when, on cold wintry 

 mornings, an alarm clock and my mother's 

 impatient voice were but silence compared with the 

 caw of a passing crow. And many a deciding 

 overhead volley in tennis have I lost by the 

 inopportune swooping past of a swift or swallow. 

 But the only use of these maudlin reminiscences is 

 indication of approaching old age. 



Today, here, in the midst of our so-called 

 civilization, more than five thousand months after 

 Columbus landed, what can we do with the birds 

 about us that every Isn't-nature-wonderful person 

 is not doing .^ Bird books and keys we must have 

 for we must know their names. But what then.^* 

 The instinctive thing is a list of birds of some 

 locality, but except in the uttermost parts of the 

 earth, this has been already done again and again. 

 The last number of the Auk, the ofiicial bird maga- 

 zine of our country, had a third of its articles 

 and about one-half of the pages devoted to such 

 lists, — lists of the uttermost importance, but of 

 far distant localities. So there is little excitement 

 in an ordinary enumeration of the birds of your 

 suburban vicinity. 



But now comes the fun. Bring to bear all your 

 Holmes-Lupin-Cleek imagination and devise some 

 unusual method of observation. I once had a week 

 in a Brazilian jungle, where indiscriminate shoot- 

 ing and listing would have yielded little of value. 

 So I spent all possible time in a canvas steamer 

 chair at the foot of a berry tree and in a remarkably 



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