224 FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY— I3TH ANNUAL REPORT 



among the hardest of animals to apply census methods to, on ac- 

 count of the extensive migrations of many species, some spending 

 their summers in Canada and their winters in South America, so 

 that the bird population of any small area varies greatly at dif- 

 ferent seasons.! One might, however, make a distinction between 

 -those which nest in a given area and those which are merely tran- 

 sients. 



Under the circumstances therefore the best that can be done is . 

 to guess at the number of species of mammals and birds occurring 

 in our area and present a few random notes on them and other an- 

 imals that are abundant or especially characteristic, or useful or 

 troublesome. They will be taken up approximately in systematic 

 order, beginning with the highest types, and with occasional refer- 

 ences to extinct species known to have existed here in past geo- 

 logical epochs, t 



There are of course quite a number of scientific and popular 

 books and articles on the animals of our area, ranging from the 

 narratives of i8th century explorers who tried to describe every- 

 thing they saw in what was to them a wonder-land, and more 

 modern popular works on hunting and fishing, to monographs of 

 particular families or other groups for the whole country, and 

 short lists of mammals, birds, insects, shells, etc., for some partic- 

 ular neighborhood. The writer has had access to comparatively 

 few of these zoological works, and it would be out of the ques- 

 tion to list even those few. One of the earliest really scientific 

 works on our fauna is that of Dr. J. A. Allen on the mammals and 

 winter birds of East Florida.* One that covers a greater variety 

 of animals but only a small area geographically is Prof. W. S. 



fTwo preliminary bird censuses of the United States, by W. W. Cooke, 

 have been published by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, as Bulletins 

 187 (11 pp., Feb. 1915), and 396 (20 pp., October, 1916) but thei author died 

 before the publication of the second one, and little seems to have been done 

 in that line since. 



$A good example of a detailed study of the fauna of a small area, but 

 with the quantitative viewpoint almost lacking, as usual, is "An ecological 

 survey of Isle Royale, Lake Superior,"' by Chas. C. Adams and others, a vol- 

 ume of 484 pages and numerous plates, which accompanies the Report of the 

 Michigan Geological Survey for 1908. 



*Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool. Harvard Coll. 2:161-450, pi. 4-8. 1871. Reviewed 

 by E. Coues in Amer. Naturalist 5:364-373. 1871. 



