A LIFE RECORD 33 



trees, flowers and animals of the island ; and sent his 

 men with him in boats up the rivers of the forest where 

 he saw "flocks of noisy parrots, scarlet and white ibis 

 and heard the harsh scream of a bird called a horned 

 screamer. ' ' These all produced in Mr. Boardman's mind 

 such a love for birds and natural objects that he returned 

 from his trip imbued with a new love of nature and 

 determined to study and know something of our own 

 birds and our own natural historj'-, of which, up to that 

 time, he had possessed only the knowledge of any intel- 

 ligent country boy. " For a naturalist it was a wonder- 

 ful land under luminous skies, where summer and bloom 

 last all the year" — were Mr. Boardman's words in con- 

 cluding his paper. He believed, however, that there 

 were many birds, plants, trees and animals in Maine 

 about which it was every one's duty to know something 

 and he resolved to spend some portion of each day in 

 their study. What an authority in Maine ornithology 

 he became and what knowledge he afterward acquired 

 of the fauna of the St. Croix valley, the lists which he 

 gave to science abundantly testify. It may be added 

 here that Mr. Boardman's firm sent much lumber to the 

 port of St. Pierre, Martinique, which entered into the 

 construction of the buildings destroyed by the volcanic 

 eruption of May 8-9, 1902. 



Mrs. Taylor, Mr. Boardman's daughter, relates an 

 interesting instance of how, when a very small girl — she 

 was born in 1846 — with her younger brother, she watched 

 the movements of some birds for her father. A pair of 

 yellow warblers had nested in a tree quite close to the 

 house — the first cottage in which the family lived — and 

 in a gale the wind had nearly torn the nest away, tip- 



