3 
Droppings April 20, 1964 
The second half of the Phoenix-Line trip produced another 18,000 
birds banded. This brings us to roughly 63,000 banded for the year - 
already more than three-quarters of last year's total'. While 90 percent 
are Blue-faced Boobies and Sooty Terns, the Crested Tern (four banded 
on Cook Island in March) can now be added to the Species Banded list 
as a result of the ambitious ATF crew efforts. 
Work on the third section of the Field Guide is just now getting 
underway. This is the part dealing with identification. Several different 
expressions of opinion have been heard on how this topic should be covered. 
There seems to be a lot of interest in having detailed descriptions of 
hard-to-identify species, including detailed descriptions of sub-species 
that can be identified in the field. While the latter coverage would 
involve only a few examples, it would be very helpful from the point of 
view of knowing what to collect. The question of how to age and sex 
birds in the hand seems to be another subject that needs treatment. So 
generally speaking, there seems to be two big needs: (l) an aid to in¬ 
land identification, and (2) a guide to distant sight identification. Any 
thoughts on how these two subjects can be best treated aid which one 
should have special priority will be most welcome. 
Progress continues on making up a list of canditate bibliographic 
sources for infromation to be included in the Pacific Islands Reference 
File. The Library has been requested to make available over 800 publications 
to date and this number does not include material published in the last 
ten years for which a separate search is now being carried out. A Prospectus 
of the Reference File has been drafted and we hope to get the office gals 
