INTRODUCTION 
By Florence Merriam Bailey 
N EW MEXICO has the distinction of being the first State in the 
Union from which bird notes were recorded by white men. These 
notes refer to birds seen on the Coronado Expedition in 1540, three 
hundred and eighty-eight years ago, eighty-two years before the first 
recorded birds were seen in New England (see Thomas Morton’s New 
English Canaan, printed in 1637). 
The actual study of the birds of New Mexico has attracted naturalists 
from the days of the early explorations that crossed parts of New 
Mexico, the first records being made on the Long Expedition to the 
Rocky Mountains in 1820. The field notes now brought together 
include the published records of the early surveys, other printed reports 
and notes, and migration notes from various observers, together with 
the much greater mass of unpublished records of the Bureau of Bio¬ 
logical Survey, U. S. Department of Agriculture, from 1889 down to the 
year 1928. 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
The systematic survey of New Mexico was definitely undertaken 
in 1903, under the direction of Dr. C. Hart Merriam, then Chief 
of the Biological Survey; and Mr. Vernon Bailey, who had just com¬ 
pleted a survey of the adjoining State of Texas, 1 was put in charge of the 
work. When the field investigations carried on by Mr. Bailey and a corps 
of assistants were finally completed, while he was occupied in preparing 
the reports on the life and crop zones, 2 and on the mammals of the 
State, Prof. Wells Woodbridge Cooke was asked to assemble the 
material for the bird report. 
In performing this task, in order to enable future students the more 
easily to locate the work previously done in the State, Professor Cooke, 
with characteristic painstaking labor, compiled a chronological list of 
all reliable observers, from 1820 to 1916, with their itineraries and pub¬ 
lished reports, supplemented by a dated, minute list of localities visited, 
many of them not on the maps; while, for the benefit of local students, 
he compiled State lists showing the detailed distribution of each of the 
three hundred and forty-nine well-authenticated species and subspecies 
and the thirteen additional hypothetical ones which he credited to the 
1 Bailey, Vernon, Biological Survey of Texas. 
Agr., 1905. 
- Bailey, Vernon, Life Zones and Crop Zones 
Surv., U. S. Dept. Agr., 1913. 
N. Amer. Fauna No. 25, Biol. Surv., U. S. Dept, 
of New Mexico. N. Amer. Fauna No. 35, Biol. 
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