BAHAMA BIRD-LIFE 



INTRODUCTORY 



To the naturalist there is an unusual interest in the 

 study of island life. An island may be a world with a defi- 

 nitely known history. Possibly we may even give the date 

 of its appearance, as bar. reef, or cone, above the waters. In 

 attempting, therefore, to analyze the life of such islands we 

 are not confronted by those perplexing problems which 

 often render similar efforts with mainland faunas so far 

 from satisfactory. 



The Bahamas, for example, present a comparatively 

 simple case. The shallow waters of the Bahaman Bank 

 support a great variety of lime-secreting animals — corals, 

 gorgonias, alga 1 , echinoderms, mollusks, etc., whose skele- 

 tons ground up by the action of the waves make a calcar- 

 eous sand of which every island in the group, from Great 

 Bahama, to Turks Island, a distance of some 550 miles, is 

 composed. 



It is not essential to describe the a?olian process through 

 which these islands were formed — so well illustrated by the 

 exposure in the approach to the Queen's Stairway at Nas- 

 sau — but it is important for us to know that there is no geo- 

 logic or biologic evidence to show that they have ever been 

 connected with other land. They belong, therefore, to the 

 class which Wallace has designated as Oceanic Islands as 

 opposed to Continental Islands, like, for instance, Trinidad 

 or England and Scotland. 



Island-making is still in active progress in the Bahamas 

 and one has only to cruise through the group to see islands 

 in every stage of development and obtain, as it were, an epi- 



