1907 ^] Swales & Taverner, Birds of Southeastern Michigan. 135 



RECENT ORNITHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN 

 SOUTHEASTERN MICHIGAN. 



BY B. H. SWALES AND P. A. TAVERNER. 



Nature means change. Nature plus man means transforma- 

 tion. The time is passing, and with it many of our once common 

 species are traveling to extinction. The records of the past are 

 fragmentary and misty and, in the light of present day conditions, 

 the accounts of old authors are often almost past belief. Of the 

 great flocks of water birds that once visited our waters, but an 

 infinitesimal fraction remain and, in many specific cases, none at 

 all. Just what the conditions were, in the old days, it is hard to 

 tell. Game was too common, then, to be mentioned specifically; 

 and now we can but surmise at what the great migrant hordes 

 were composed of. Even at a later date ornithological knowledge 

 of the rarer forms was too rare and incomplete to form the basis 

 of modern scientific conclusion. What has been change and what 

 misreport is but too often the problem of our list makers. The 

 changes have been gradual and are still going on, but too often 

 we have only awakened to the fact of the growing rarity of a species 

 when it has utterly vanished from our horizon. Through it all, 

 various observers have come, noted and gone; and their records 

 have been copied and recopied and present conceptions of avi- 

 faunal conditions, in many cases, are but composite pictures of 

 various past stages and the present. The limited oportunities 

 most of the older observers enjoyed for the definitions of the ob- 

 scurer forms, their more or less indefinite data and the loss of 

 their specimens, also throws a veil of doubt over their records 

 that there is now no way of piercing. 



The past has gone and left but scanty record behind. Whether 

 the present does likewise, rests with us of the present. That the 

 next generation may not say of this as we say of the past, it seems 

 most necessary, as various points turn up, that they should be put 

 in an enduring form, as well for the correction of current mis- 

 conception, as for a legacy to the future. To this end, the following 

 notes have been sifted from our note books, as showing the salient 



