INTRODUCTION 
Apparently the first attempt to catalog all the birds known at any one time 
from California was made by Dr. James G. Cooper in his unsigned contribution 
to Cronise’s Natural Wealth of California (pp. 448-480), published in 1868. A 
brief running account is there given of 353 species. In 1890, Lyman Belding 
(Occasional Papers, u, California Academy of Sciences) ascribed 295 species of 
land birds to California, and in 1892, Walter E. Bryant (Zoe, 11, pp. 135-140) 
listed 150 water birds, making a total of 445 species and subspecies then credited 
to the state. Ten years later, in Pacific Coast Avifauna number 3, 1902, the 
present writer enumerated, with brief annotations, 491 species and subspecies ; 
and in 1912, in Pacific Coast Avifauna number 8, the same author gave a nom- 
inal list of 530 forms. The present contribution shows a total of 541 species 
and subspecies believed at the time of going to press, May 1, 1915, to properly 
belong to the Recent avifauna of the state. 
Of course, in each of the previous lists there have been some erroneous 
entries; but the omission of these names in the succeeding list has always been 
more than compensated for by additions during the intervening period. This 
process may be expected to continue almost ad infinitum, as long as faunal lists 
are published. As in the fifteen years or so just past, the increments will come 
chiefly through the detection of stragglers, and, judging from the nature of those 
already recorded, individuals representing practically every species and sub- 
species in North America and the adjacent waters may be expected to reach 
California sooner or later. This would probably hold true as well for any other 
area in temperate America. 
A notable part of the recent expansion in our state list has been due to more 
intensive exploration, to the accumulation of series of specimens more or less 
fully representing practically all of our faunal areas, and to the resulting activ- 
ity in subspecifie discrimination made possible by these favoring circumstances. 
While a great gain has been evident of recent years in the accumulation of 
materials for the study of avian distribution, our basis for exhaustive research in 
this line is yet far from ideal. The present writer, after having gone over the 
literature with considerable care, confesses that there is still so much to be 
desired that he has been discouraged from attempting now, as originally planned, 
a far more detailed definition of the range of each species of California bird. 
