PREFACE xiii 



tained in a series of papers published in the Ibis 

 of 1861-62-63, by Capt. Blakiston, who spent 

 the winter of 1857-58 at Fort Carlton on the 

 Saskatchewan River, and in 1858 collected at 

 various points in what is now the Province of 

 Saskatchewan. In these papers Capt. Blakiston 

 incorporated much information from Vol. II of 

 the Fauna Boreali- Americana of Richardson and 

 Swainson, and other published sources of infor- 

 mation. Since then our knowledge of the birds 

 of Southern Saskatchewan has been considerably 

 enlarged, but strangely enough the ornithology 

 of the great region drained by the Churchill 

 River, and lying to the north of what was, till 

 1912, the northern boundary of the province, 

 has had little or no attention paid to it. Notes 

 on the birds were made by James M. Macoun, 

 who in 1888 travelled from Lesser Slave Lake 

 east by way of the Athabasca and Churchill 

 Rivers to Lake ^Winnipeg ; these notes were 

 eventually published by John Macoun in his 

 Catalogue of Canadian Birds. Less than a dozen 

 birds are in the United States National Museum, 

 collected at Du Brochet Lake in 1890 and 

 Pelican Narrows on the Churchill River in 1891 ; 

 probably collected by Henry MacKay and Joseph 

 Hourston, for Roderick MacFarlane. These are 

 the only skins I have seen from the region taken 

 previous to 1914. During the years 1892-93-94, 

 J. Burr Tyrrell, in the course of his explorations 

 of the Barren Grounds, more than once traversed 

 the Churchill River and his official reports l con- 



1 Annual Report Geological Survey of Canada, viii. (new series), 

 Part D, pp. 5n to 120D, Ottawa, 1896 ; ibid. ix. 1896, Part F 

 (1897). 



