HISTORICAL REVIEW xi 
field work during the past fifteen years. Not only has the fascination 
of camera hunting itself stimulated the bird photographer, but the 
results he has obtained have at times had a commercial value, which 
has enabled him to pursue his labors in before unexplored fields. In 
consequence, in the books of Job, Finley, Dugmore, and others, and in 
numerous magazine articles, we now have thousands of graphic records, 
not one of which existed fifteen years ago, depicting the home-life 
of some of our rarest as well as commonest birds, and possessed of a 
power for conveying and diffusing information with which the written 
word cannot compare. 
Here, too, should be mentioned the work of the ornithological 
artists who, lead by Fuertes, have given us an unsurpassed series of 
faithful and beautiful portraits of our birds, to the educational value 
of which, in no small measure, is to be attributed the existing wide- 
spread interest in bird study. 
It is the growth of this interest which has chiefly distinguished the 
past two decades; for, much as they have been marked by activity in 
various branches of ornithology, it is less as an exponent of natural laws 
than as a most attractive form of wild life that the bird has made its 
appeal. In the history of North American ornithology, therefore,this 
period may well stand as the Epoch of Popular Bird Study. Where, in 
1895, there was one person who could claim acquaintance with our 
commoner birds, today there are hundreds; and the plea for the develop- 
ment of our inherent love of birds, which was made in the first edition 
of the “Handbook,” has been answered with an effectiveness few 
would have predicted. 
Opportunity alone was needed to bring to its fulfilment this inborn 
interest in creatures which have such manifold claims to our attention, 
and with which we may become so intimately associated. This oppor- 
tunity has come in popular manuals of bird study, which, in the aggre- 
gate, have been sold by hundreds of thousands; in the introduction of 
nature study in the schools, in the formation of bird clubs and classes, 
through the far-reaching and important work of the National and State 
Audubon Societies, through popular lectures, through magazines 
devoted to bird study, and the greater attention of the press in general 
to bird studies—particularly such as are illustrated by photographs,— 
through increased museum facilities, and through the closer relation 
everywhere existing between the professional or advanced student and 
the amateur, a relation which must be attributed primarily to the influence 
exerted by the American Ornithologists’ Union. 
It is the diffusion of this widespread knowledge of the economic, as 
well as the esthetic importance of birds, which has made it possible to 
secure the passage and enforcement of effective laws for their protection; 
and it is in this continued and increasing interest in birds, not alone as 
our efficient co-workers in garden, field, orchard and forest, but as the 
most eloquent expression of nature’s beauty, joy and freedom, that we 
shall doubtless find a true measure of their greatest value to man. 
