MEMOIR. 
" To be able to give one's name to a bird, or a flower, may seem 
to many but a poor ambition ; and yet, materially considered, it is 
quite as likely to be perpetuated as to give it to a street or town, and 
is much more likely to define the tastes and individuality of the 
giver." — Bret Harte. 
The saying has seldom been truer of any one 
than of the writer of the succeeding pages, that 
"the child is father of the man." His love of 
nature generally, and of natural history in all its 
branches, was one of Frank Oates's earliest instincts ; 
and to the study of our English wild-birds — their 
ways and haunts, their comings and their goings — 
he was especially devoted from boyhood. The 
pages of Waterton and Buffon, treating of wider 
fields of study, supplied his imagination at that 
period with richer food ; and the plates of Audubon's 
Birds, when access could be had to them, were 
turned by him with feelings little short of reverence. 
From his earliest days he had resolved to visit those 
distant, and, to him, still mysterious lands, where 
the page of nature was yet to the white man in 
great part an unread book ; and those who, after 
