BENEATH TROPIC SEAS 



few hours of intermittent observation I identified 

 seventy-six species actually from the tree itself. 

 Incidentally I found that all the birds collected, 

 yielded valuable data as to food, molt, etc. So 

 choose a pond or a tree or a field and make its 

 individual census. 



If you insist on lists however, for lists' sake, at 

 least leaven the linear results with some unusual 

 point of view. The fact that English sparrows, 

 starlings, crows, robins, grackles and swallows 

 are the most abundant birds seen on most of your 

 tramps, although uninteresting knowledge to the 

 half of one per cent, and wholly unknown to the 

 ninety -four and a half per cent, is rather bromidic 

 to the glorious remaining five per cent of us. One 

 way to alchemize this effect is to preface the fact 

 with the short but often embarrassing adverb. 

 Why? 



In this instance it spells trouble, for it sends us 

 headlong to libraries and museums, to look up the 

 earliest records and lists of birds. From the time 

 of Columbus and Hendrik Hudson down to the last 

 American Ornithologists' Union check list, there 

 waits a tremendously interesting field for some one. 

 Even the dullest of us five-percenters should see 

 something significant in the fact that a century ago 

 woodpeckers and creepers were far more abundant 

 in New York State than robins and barn-swallows. 

 If two decades ago I could have had the advance 

 tip that English sparrows would, in time, decrease 

 almost to the vanishing point in New York city, 



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