XI. THE BIRDS OF THE ISLE OF PINES. 



By W. E. Clyde Todd. 



Incorporating the Substance of Field-notes by Gustav A. Link. 



(Plates XXII-XXVII.) 



Introduction. 



Although the West Indian Islands were among the first regions of 

 the New World to be visited by explorers with a scientific turn of 

 mind, their fauna thus early becoming known to the naturalists of 

 Europe, and although subsequent researches have greatly increased 

 our knowledge, it is only in comparatively recent years that systematic 

 attempts have been made to investigate the islands from the stand- 

 point of the zoogeographer, and with the same painstaking care as 

 has been used in the case of certain sections of continental America. 

 The West Indian Islands present a most inviting field for further 

 investigation and, indeed, so far as their avifauna is concerned, an 

 exhaustive treatise on the subject remains to be written. The im- 

 portance of a study of island-life, considered in its bearing upon the 

 various problems connected with the evolution of species, and their 

 present distribution and relationships, has during the past four 

 decades come to be realized. It is more and more felt that the study 

 of the organism in relation to its environment, constituting the new 

 science of ecology, is of equal importance with the study of form and 

 function, and that carefully recorded data as to the habits and life- 

 history of a given species are often more valuable, even from the stand- 

 point of the pure systematist, than a large series of finely prepared 

 and accurately labelled specimens. 



It is with such considerations as these in mind that the present paper 

 has been prepared, and is submitted as a contribution to a faunal 

 survey of the West Indies, along lines similar to those followed 

 by the writer in an earlier paper on the ornithology of the Bahama 

 Islands (Annals Carnegie Museum, VII, 1911, 388-464). It is 

 primarily based on a collection of birds made in the Isle of Pines by 

 Mr. Gustav A. Link, of the taxidermic force of the Carnegie Museum, 



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