BIRDS COLLECTED BY THE CHILDS FRICK EXPE- 

 DITION TO ETHIOPIA AND KENYA COLONY 



Part 2.— PASSERES 



By Herbert Friedmann 



Curator, Division of Birds, United States National Museum 



INTRODUCTION 



The two volumes comprising this report on the ornithological 

 work of the Childs Frick expedition may be looked upon as a memo- 

 rial to the late Dr. Edgar Alexander Mearns, to whose untiring energy 

 and unflagging zeal is due the great bulk of the material collected. 

 Dr. Mearns was in rather poor health when he joined the Frick 

 expedition, and he was urged on by the desire to add to the collections 

 he had amassed the previous year when with Colonel Roosevelt in 

 Kenya Colony, Uganda, and the Sudan, thereby to enable him to make 

 a more thorough contribution to African ornithology. The vast 

 number of specimens he gathered together during the course of the 

 Frick expedition would have been greatly to the credit of a collector 

 in the prime of health to say nothing of one in Mearns's physical 

 condition. Probably no more indefatigable collector ever roamed on 

 African soil. When one realizes that the actual time the Frick 

 expedition was in Africa was less than 10 months and that the party 

 was almost constantly on the move, the fact that Mearns collected 

 approximately 5,200 birds besides a number of nests and eggs, and 

 filled a number of notebooks with observational data, reveals in an 

 unmistakable way his great ardor, diligence, and industry. 



For the photographs reproduced in this volume I am greatly in- 

 debted to Dr. W. H. Osgood, of the Field Museum of Natural His- 

 tory, who has kindly allowed me to use pictures taken by him and his 

 associates, Alfred M. Bailey and J. C. Albrecht, during the Field 

 Museum's Daily News expedition to Ethiopia. To A. B. Fuller, of 

 the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, I am indebted for the 

 north Kenyan photographs (pis. 12-14). 



For loan of material for comparative studies I am indebted to the 

 authorities of the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum 

 of Comparative Zoology, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Phila- 

 delphia, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Cleveland 



Museum of Natural History. 



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