24 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis 



OUR BIRDS IN WINTER. 



Illustrated by Life-Size Colored Pictures. 

 (St. Louis Naturalists' Club, February 28, 1920.) 



Forty members of the St. Louis Bird Club counted 

 twenty-seven species of birds in taking a Christmas cen- 

 sus for ''Bird Lore," covering four square miles in the 

 vicinity of Creve Coeur Lake on December 27, 1919. The 

 same number of species was reported by the St. Louis 

 Bird Club on December 22, 1918, but Dent Jokerst and 

 Paul Dent, by making twelve miles on foot in seven hours 

 on the same day, enumerated forty-four species. This is 

 all one party can be expected to see in one day, but if 

 a few days of observation could have been added and dif- 

 ferent localities visited, the number might have been in- 

 creased to fifty-six, as has been done once by me. And 

 even this number is possible of a farther increase by 

 some of the casual species that may be met with only by 

 a rare chance and of which tliere are about ten. 



The three Audubon Charts, though made in Massachu- 

 setts, can be used to advantage for our purpose, since the 

 bird fauna of the United States east of the 100th merid- 

 ian, or about the middle of Kansas, is practically the 

 same. The only drawback is that they do not contain all 

 the species mentioned. 



Beginning at the upper left corner of Chart No. 3, the 

 Northern Shrike or Butcherbird, Lanius borealis, comes 

 to us in November and leaves us in March. It breeds in 

 Canada and Alaska and winters in the northern United 

 States and as far to the south as North Carolina, Ken- 

 tucky, Arkansas, Texas and Central California. It is a 

 larger bird than the Shrike which is with us in the sum- 

 mer, formerly called Loggerhead, now Migrant Shrike, 

 one of the several subspecies of the Loggerhead. The 

 typical Loggerhead, at home only in the southern states, 

 differs from the Migrant in having the wings slightly 

 shorter and the general coloration darker. In western 



