yj PREFACE. 



across to tin* Pacitie- Coast, fiinl that t>t' John Iv. Townsend and Mr. Xuttall, 

 l»oth of wlioiii made suim* cMllc'ctiniis and l»r(m,u;lit luick iiuticL's of the t'dun- 

 trv, which, how c' or, lliev were uuahle to exjdore to any ^reat extent. The 

 entire region of Texas, New Mexico, Cohaado, Arizona, Nevada, and Cali- 

 fornia was unvisited, as also a ^reat portion of territory north of the United 

 States boundary, including liritish ('(dunibia and Alaska. 



A work hv SirJolm Richardson, forming a volume in his series of " Fauna 

 lioreali-Aniericana, ' in reference to the ornitludogy of the region covered by 

 the Ihulson liay Company's operations, was published in 1831, and has 

 been much used by Mr. Audubon, l»ut embraces little or nothing of the great 

 Ijreeding-urounds of the water birds in the neighborhood of the Great Slave 

 and P>ear hikes, the Upi)er Yukon, and the shores of the Arctic coast. 



It will thus be seen that a third of a century has elapsed since any at- 

 tempt has been made to present a systematic history of the birds of North 

 America. 



The object of the i)resent work is to give, in as concise a form as possible, 

 an account of what is known of the birds, not onlv of the United States, but 

 of the whole region of North America north of the boiindary-liiie of Mexico, 

 including (Jreenland, on the one side, and Alaska with its islands on the 

 other. The published materials for such a history are so copious that it is a 

 matter of surjaise that they have not been sooner utilized, consisting, as they 

 do, of numer«»us scattered biographies and reports of many government expe- 

 ditions and i)rivate exi»lorations. Hut the most productive source has been 

 the great amount of manuscript contained in the archives of the Smithsonian 

 Institution in tlie form of correspondence, elaborate reports, and the field- 

 notes of collectors and travellers, the use of which, for the present work, has 

 been liberally allowed by Professo" Henry. P>y far the most important of 

 these consist of notes made by the late Ifobert Kennicott in British America, 

 and received from him and other gentlemen in the Hudson Bay Territory, 

 Avho were brought into intimate relationship with the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion through Mr. Kennicott's efforts. Among them may be mentioned more 

 es])ecially ^Ir. K. ^lacFarlane, Mr. B. li. Boss, Mr. James Lockhart, Mr. 

 Liwrence Clark, ^Ir. Strachan Jones, and others, whose names Avill appear 

 in the course of the work. The especial value of the communications re- 

 ceived from these gentlemen lies in the fact that they resided for a long 

 time in a region to which a large proportion of the mpaciiMis and water birds 

 of North America resort during the summer for incubation, and wdiicli imtil 

 recently has been sealed to explorers. 



Etpially serviceable has been the information received from the region of 

 the Yukon Biver and Alaska generaBy, including the Aleutian Islands, as 

 supplied by ^lessrs. Bobert Kenn.cott, \Villiam H. DaB, Henry M. Bannister, 

 Hemy AV. Elliott, and others. 



It should be understood that the remarks as to the absence of general works 

 on American Ornithology, since the time of Audubon, ai)ply only to the life 



