Peli teom As De BoOoNem bis Iseel IN 43 
SONGBIRDS IN YOUR GARDEN. By John K. Terres. 
Thomas Crowell Co., New York. 256 pages. Illustrated. 
This is an expanded, deluxe edition — quite big (7x10’’), and illustrated 
by Matthew Kalmenoff, and it’s currently being promoted by garden clubs. 
You'll enjoy the delightful anecdotes that enrich the wealth of detail on 
how to fill your yard and garden with song and color. 
One clever man saw crossbills swarm over a ruined building, pecking 
at the crumbling mortar, so he pounded up a lot of this mortar and 
seattered it on trampled-down snow in his own garden. He had crossbills 
eating it every day for weeks — apparently famished for the calcium, 
lime and grit. 
Nine pairs of barn swallows took white chicken feathers on the wing 
from the upstairs window of a farm invalid who speeded her recovery by 
the facination of helping the nesting birds. Another man put up 98 nest 
boxes and won 60 pairs of tree swallows one spring. Others found out that 
young cardinals like walnut meats; catbirds enjoy raisins; orioles love 
half an orange impaled to your feeding shelf, and blue jays will eat the 
skins of baked potatoes. A book rich with good advice, and practical 
illustrations on nesting boxes and plantings, bird baths winter and summer, 
“Songbirds In Your Garden” will give you the do’s and don’ts of attracting 
birds and beauty just beyond your doorstep. 
— Betty Groth 
ILLINOIS BIRDS: Mimidae 
By Richard Graber, Jean Graber, and Ethelyn Kirk. 
Biological Notes No. 68, Ill. Natural History Survey, 1970. 
It may surprise many people to learn that comparatively little is known 
about Illinois birds and especially scant quantitative information is avail- 
able. Understanding of bird populations, their seasonal and yearly fluctua- 
tions and migrations is little advanced over what it was about a century 
ago when Robert Ridgway first started his studies of Illinois birds. 
Accelerating changes in the land have brought us to a potentially 
precarious ecological state with which we are ill-prepared to deal or even 
to assess. We need to know more than simply what animals and plants 
occur in Illinois. We need answers to many questions — questions about 
the distribution of populations, their reproductive potentials and food 
habits, their energy and habitat requirements, their migration routes, 
and ultimately their ecological relationships to every other part of the 
environment. The answers will come for the birds of Illinois through the 
efforts of many dedicated students of all ages throughout the state. 
The INHS has published the first part of a series of reports on Illinois 
Birds (Biological Note No. 68, September 1970). This first part deals with 
the family Mimidae (mocking birds, catbirds and thrashers) and was 
prepared by Richard R. Graber, Jean W. Graber, and Ethelyn Kirk. This 
paper, like those to follow, attempts to summarize what has been recorded 
about Illinois birds. The series includes exhaustive information culled from 
the literature as well as significant studies on migrations, population sizes, 
breeding, overwintering, and food habits discovered through the research 
efforts of the authors. To illustrate the magnitude of the literature search, 
the authors perused about 1,500 references for the family Mimidae alone. 
The paper is well-illustrated with photographs of birds and nests, and 
