IN’'TRODUCTION. 
UR GREAT country is exceedingly rich in birds of song and beauty. 
There is no region on the globe that can boast of such a large 
variety of charming birds as the United States. During the most 
beautiful time of the year, when the soft, mild air is filled with the 
fragrance of numberless flowers, when in the South the magnificent 
magnolia, the orange tree, and the loblolly bay blossom, in the North 
the apple tree opens its rosy flower buds, when the shrubs on the wood- 
; land’s edge are white with blossoms, we may listen to a concert of bird 
: 5 music that nowhere finds its rival. Without these jubilant and cheerful 
>, songsters nature would seem to us lifeless and dead. Our birds are the 
Ca C true poets of the landscape, imbuing joy, happiness, and song to woodland 
and meadow, orchard and field. Their fine form and color, their innocent 
and happy life, their cheerful song, their rapid and graceful flight cannot fail to create a 
sympathetic sentiment in the heart of every feeling man. They must attract the attention 
of even the most casual observer. A rich vegetation, and consequently an abundant 
supply of insects, is necessary to bring bird life to its greatest perfection. Every locality 
has its characteristic songsters. The thickets on the woodland border and the honey- 
suckles in the garden corner harbor one of our most beautiful and interesting songsters, 
the Catbird, while the Brown Thrasher sings its enchanting anthems of morn nowhere 
so frequently than in the osage orange hedge-rows of northern Illinois. The Indigobird 
and the Nonpareil are pre-eminently partial to dense thickets and brier patches near 
dwellings. The Bobolink, one of our most enchanting songsters, is the poet of the low 
flower-adorned meadow. ‘The cheerful Red-wing Blackbird enlivens the sedge-covered 
sloughs and swamps, and the social Yellow-headed. Blackbird was once very common 
in the extensive marshes of northern Illinois and Wisconsin. The sweet E-o-lie of the 
Wood Thrush resounds in all the deciduous woodlands of the Middle States, while the 
indescribably sweet song of the Veery is heard more frequently in the mixed woods of 
the northern part of our country, usually near the babbling waters of a brook or a 
cool spring. The live oak and mesquit prairies of Texas are the true home of the richly 
