tebe Uae BrOoNee BeUr il bb oIeN 15 
since almost any robin who has chosen to spend the winter in our Chicago 
region can make the front page of a leading newspaper by coming out from 
his retreat some snowy day in search of food. A few of the most interested 
become amateur ornithologists, to whom bird study is a sport, a hobby. 
If they have houses and gardens they may be content with studying the 
birds they have at hand, but if they live in apartments they are more 
likely to search the parks, the cemeteries, the shore of the lake, or the 
outlying sloughs, trying to learn the identification of as many species as 
possible. Their game is the making of lists—life lists, year lists, day lists. 
These they keep with as great a sense of honor as a conscientious golfer 
keeps his score, putting down no bird if there is any reason to doubt its 
identification. 
There is a gulf between these amateur ornithologists and the profes- 
sional ornithologists. The former have the fun, the latter the work. The 
attitude of one is emotional, that of the other factual. The professional 
bands his birds and weighs them morning, noon, and night; or he kills 
them by the thousand for their skins, which he wants either for his private 
collection or for that of some museum. He opens up their stomachs to see 
what they have eaten, counting and identifying the bugs and seeds he finds 
there. The amateur may admit that science makes these demands but he 
shudders at them nevertheless. He thinks of the birds as friends and is 
revolted by the idea of peering into their little insides. 
Since bird study with me is only a hobby, and since I live in an 
apartment, my interest has been centered in the year’s list. Once when I 
was a beginner my goal was the identification of one hundred different 
species for the Chicago area. Last year for the first time I set it at two 
hundred, which was only thirty-five short of the best that has ever been 
reported in this area. But now that the year is ended and the goal has 
been reached, I find as I turn back over the pages of my note book that 
the game was a small part of my satisfaction. 
As I sit looking over the record, it seems in my reverie like a Chinese 
picture scroll, one day wide and three hundred sixty-five days long. The 
background is a neutral color made up of the common birds seen so often 
and in so many places that they do not stand out in memory—the Herring 
gulls, the common ducks, the robins, the juncos, tree sparrows, even blue- 
birds and meadow-larks. On this background are the vivid figures of the 
rarer birds, seen perhaps for the first time, or of some bird not rare in 
itself but which has furnished a rare experience. These figures scattered 
throughout the scroll represent moments common to all ornithologists, when 
the spirit stands free from its imprisonment and they are conscious only 
of the elation of the present—such moments, though achieved in various 
ways, as we all live by and for unless the routine of life has beaten us 
into hopeless and continual dullness. 
The first figures are those of crossbills, both the white-winged and the 
red. They bring back the Sunday a group of us spent in the Morton 
Arboretum in January—the rolling, snow-covered landscape, the many 
snow-laden clumps of evergreens, the out-door picnic lunch about the open 
fire. But for me the climax of the day was coming upon these beautiful 
