Preface 



For more than fifty years the National Audubon Society has 

 worked for the preservation of our native bird life and, over the 

 last twenty years, has initiated and carried out studies of the lives 

 and special needs of a number of North American birds that con- 

 tinue to be threatened with extinction, in spite of the great ad- 

 vances that have been made in the conservation field in recent 

 years. One phase of these studies has been the publication of 

 monographs on each of the species concerned complete life his- 

 tories that summarize everything that is known about these birds, 

 with practical recommendations for arresting their decline and 

 thus preventing their disappearance from the American scene. 

 Although such publications represent an important and essential 

 part of the over-all contribution that is made by these projects, 

 they are not an end in themselves. Our efforts to follow through 

 along the lines indicated as a result of each study are a continuing 

 responsibility, a job that must end in eventual success or complete 

 failure, or not at all. 



Nevertheless, those of us who have been actively associated 

 with this program experience an understandable sense of relief 

 and a certain feeling of accomplishment when the painstaking 

 search for facts and for clues that may lead to a happy solution 

 are finally assembled, in more or less readable form, between the 

 covers of one of our monographs. At least that has been this au- 

 thor's reaction to the publication of our reports on the whooping 

 crane and, more recently, on the American flamingo. Together 



