William Brewster, 1851-1919 279 



him. A large proportion of his published studies, therefore, relate to living 

 rather than to dead birds, to faunal and biographic, rather than to system- 

 atic ornithology. 



The Index to the Bulletin of the Nuttall Club and to its successor, The 

 Auk, covering the period from 1876 to 1900, has some 230 entries under the 

 name of William Brewster. This was the period of his greatest activity. The 

 index to The Auk for the following ten years, 1901 to 1911, contains only 

 thirty entries under his name, though it should be added that some of his 

 most important publications appeared after 1900. 



While many of these titles relate merely to unusual 'occurrences,' there 

 are among them original contributions to ornithology of the first rank. Notable 

 among the more technical papers is the series describing the juvenal plumages 

 of North American birds, in the study of which Brewster was a pioneer; the 

 reports on Stephen's collections from Arizona and Sonora, and on Frazar's 

 from northern Mexico and Lower California, a memoir on the latter collec- 

 tion forming a quarto of 241 pages. 



Faunal papers on his expeditions to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, West Vir- 

 ginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Florida added much to our knowledge 

 of the distribution of many of the birds treated, and they abound in biograph- 

 ical matter, while the classical 'Memoir' on 'Bird Migration' was, at the time 

 of its appearance, the most important paper which had been published on 

 that subject. 



But Brewster's most characteristic and, in many respects, most valuable 

 papers are on the habits of little-known birds or on the little-known habits 

 of well-known birds. The habits of the Philadelphia Vireo, Swainson's and 

 Bachman's Warblers, for example, were practically undescribed before he 

 wrote of them, and to him we owe either the first or the best descriptions of 

 the home life of the Prothonotary Warbler, Brown Creeper, Golden-crowned 

 Kinglet, and of other common birds, of summer Robin roosts, and of the notes 

 and flight-song of the Woodcock. 



Brewster confined his field-work largely to New England, not only because 

 he loved the land of his birth with an intense and increasing ardor, but because 

 it was the great ambition of his life to produce a work on the birds of that 

 region in which every species would be treated monographically. We can 

 never cease to regret that his health prohibited the accomplishment of a task 

 he was so preeminently qualified to perform. We may, however, be thankful 

 for the extended annotations which he added to the edition of Minot's 'Land- 

 Birds and Game-Birds of New England,' which appeared under his editorship, 

 and particularly for the 'Birds of the Cambridge Region,' his most noteworthy 

 contribution to faunal literature.* 



This book was to have been followed by one on the birds of the Unbagog 

 region on the New Hampshire-Maine boundary, where many of Brewster's 



*See a review of this work in Bird-Lore, 1906, p. 114. 



