THE BIRDS OF SINGAPORE ISLAND 
, INTRODUCTION, 
FrELD Work, 
In this brief mtroductioti to the study of birds we hope 
that the reader will not expect to find directions for collecting 
eggs or skinning birds and preserving their skins for these 
points we have purposely omitted. The days in which the 
amateur's miscellaneous collection of skins from odd parts of 
the world was of value have almost disappeared and nowadays 
one has to look at the map very hard in order to discover 
territor)' in which haphazard collecting methods are justified. 
With an occasional exception the collecting of vertebrate 
animals is best left to trained collectors who collect with the 
minimum expenditure of life. It would be especially lamentable 
to shoot birds in Singapore as the fauna of the island is so 
rapidly being destroyed that the student of birds can best occupy 
himself with field work in the form of observ'ation, for in this 
branch of local ornithology there is a great opportunity for 
research work. In fact we know so little of the life history of 
even the very common Malayan birds that almost any series of 
carefully made (and repeatedly checked!) observations are of 
value. Several points on which information is needed occur as 
we write and perhaps mention of these will be indicative of 
work that would be most useful. 
In the first place very little is known about the movements 
of migratory birds in Singapore. The majority of our land 
birds, for instance the bulbuls, babblers, sunbirds^ woodpeckers, 
barbets and king-crows are resident although some of them are 
subject to a certain amount of local movement. This means 
that they are breeding birds and are in the country all the 
year round. On the other hand a large number of species are 
migratory, either spending the winter in this country, their 
breeding grounds being further to the north, or merely visiting 
•/.PFLES LIBRARY 
