vi PREFACE 



he lacked many of the .helps that to-day smooth the 

 way for the beginner in bird-study. He had no inti- 

 mate acquaintance with ornithologists or scientific men 

 of any sort, and after giving up the gun in his young 

 manhood he waited many years before he purchased a 

 glass, and then bought a spy-glass, or small telescope, 

 an implement which was useful in identifying ducks 

 floating far off on the waters of the river or Walden 

 Pond, but could hardly have served him very well with 

 the flitting warblers of the tree-tops. The books, too, in 

 those days were far from adequate. Wilson and Nut- 

 tall, upon whom he chiefly relied, are unsurpassed in 

 some respects by anything we have to-day, but their 

 descriptions of birds were not designed to assist in field 

 identification, and they were by no means infallible in 

 other matters. These books were not new even in 

 Thoreau's day, but they were the best ornithological 

 manuals to be had, and with Wilson making no men- 

 tion of so common a bird as the least flycatcher, and 

 Nuttall in ignorance of the existence of the olive- 

 backed thrush, we may pardon Thoreau a few misap- 

 prehensions. 



As a matter of fact, Thoreau seems to have seen 

 things pretty accurately, — when he saw them at all, 

 for he was sometimes strangely blind to the presence 

 of birds which must have been fairly common inhabit- 

 ants of the woods and fields through which he roamed. 

 His chief difficulty in identification was, perhaps, a 

 tendency to jump at conclusions, — as when, meeting 

 with* the pileated woodpecker in the Maine woods, he 

 at once set it down as the " red-headed woodpecker 



