8 BIRDS OF THE NEW YORK CITY REGION 



identify in life, wherever the subject has not been adequately 

 treated, in the hope that this might increase the usefulness of 

 the book, without unduly increasing its bulk. 



With the purpose of the book thus defined, many matters 

 ordinarily included in a scientific monograph or treatise have 

 been omitted. In leaving out a complete bibliography, I 

 have borne in mind the fact that most of the scattered notes 

 and articles have already been listed in the bibliographies of 

 recent monographic works. Similarly, references to the 

 original publication of records have been omitted wherever 

 possible. All the published references to the captures of rare 

 birds on Long Island, for instance, have been repeated three 

 times in the last sixteen years. There is little point in re- 

 peating them a fourth time, and the very few interested can 

 obtain them in one or more of the general works given in the 

 bibliography. I have also been forced to omit discussion of 

 the more technical aspects of such questions of great interest 

 as life-zones, faunal areas, and migration. Space has also 

 been lacking to treat habits, and life histories, or to give in 

 any detail the history of vanished species. Nesting dates for 

 our local breeding birds are now well-known and readily 

 available. Unusually early or late records of complete sets of 

 eggs are deliberately left out, to discourage as much as 

 possible the local collecting of eggs, now largely a waste of life 

 without adequate scientific return. 



By all means my most difficult and ungracious task has 

 been weighing the reliability of identifications of living birds. 

 In a recent number of 'The Auk' (January 1922, pp. 31-41) I 

 have discussed at length what seem to me to be the require- 

 ments on which these " sight records" should be based. 

 Fortunately all those whose sight records appear in the fol- 

 lowing pages are either known to me personally through many 

 trips afield together, or are known to others, whose point of 

 view about such records is the same as mine. Moreover, 

 those whose records are the most frequently cited are all 



