XIV INTRODUCTION. 
vetitable paradise for birds, they live in full knowledge of their’ security, and with 
nothing to check their natural increase. The extreme scarcity of predatory birds and 
mammals, which have been for a long time nearly exterminated throughout England, 
has also assisted to bring about that affluence of bird life which is so justly the pride 
of the English people. 
“In the United States, nothwithstanding the derogatory comparisons which. have 
been made—and which, it is true, will; for reasons stated above, apply to the vicinity 
of our more densely populated centers, and also to regions of extensive forests—a con- 
dition at least closely approaching that which is claimed as peculiar to the British 
Islands may be found in certain favored sections; that is, in those parts where bits of 
deciduous woodland and open country alternate, with plenty of local variety in the 
laridscape. Such a description will apply to a very large portion of the United States 
situated between the Alleghanies, on the one hand, and the Great Plains on the other, 
although not by any means exclusively to that region. The writer was once informed 
by a young Canadian ornithologist—a specially observant ‘field naturalist’ with a 
remarkably fine ear for bird notes, and able to imitate many with great exactness— 
that during several years’ residence in England he never heard finer nor more abundant 
bird music than on the prairies of Manitoba, where the melodious and powerful war- 
blings of the Western Meadow Lark were, to his ear, superior in richness and strength 
to the song of the famed Nightingale, while the silvery trilfs of the Missouri Sky Lark 
also exceeded in sweetness the more powerful, but far from musical, rattling warble of 
the English species. 
“The writer has on many occasions heard, early on mornings in May and June, 
grand concerts of bird music, which probably would challenge comparison, both as to 
quality and quantity, with any to be heard in other portions of the world, excepting, 
probably, the highlands of Mexico, which are said, and probably with truth, to be 
without a rival in number and quality of songsters. The following list is copied from 
my note-book, and was made during the progress of such a concert, the birds named 
singing simultaneously in my immediate vicinity. The locality was not a particularly 
favorable one, being two miles from a small village, and at least three-fourths of the 
vieinity either heavy woodland or wooded swamp. The date May 12, and the locality 
south-western Indiana: 
‘Four Cardinal Grosbeaks, three Indigo Buntings, numerous American Goldfinches, 
one White-eyed Vireo, one Maryland Yellow-throat, one Field Sparrow, one Carolina 
Wren, one Tufted Titmouse, one Gray-cheeked Trush, one Yellow-breasted Chat, one 
Louisiana, Water Thrush, one Red-eyed Vireo, and two Mourning Doves—in all thirteen 
species, and at least twice that number of individuals! And here is a list of birds heard 
sitiging one day in June, about the edge of a prairie in southern Illinois: Two Mock- 
ingbirds, one Brown Thrasher, three Yellow-breasted Chats, one Warbling Vireo, one 
Baltimore Oriole, several Meadow Larks, numerous Dickcissels and Henslow’s and 
Grasshopper Sparrows, one Lark Sparrow, one Robin, one Towhee, one Catbird, one 
Wood Thrush, one Ovenbird, one Summer Tanager, several Tufted Titmice, one Red- 
eyed Vireo, one Bell’s Vireo, one White-eyed Vireo, one Cardinal Grosbeak, one Indigo 
Banting, two Maryland Yellow-throats, one Field Sparrow, and one Prairie Lark—the 
