A Pocket Guide to Birds [antikvár]

PREFACE One day at the Audubon Camp of Maine a bird landed high in a spruce. As soon as I called it a red-breasted nuthatch several students asked, "How do you know?" Anxious to be helpful I told them the identification was extremely simple because the red-breasted is our only nuthatch with a dark line through its eye. One lady immediately said, "That is all very well, but to begin with, how do I know it is a nuthatch?" Dr. Henry Holmes who was then dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard smiled and said, "Allan, remember the adage that whereas a teacher must never underestimate the intelligence of his students, he must be equally sure never to overestimate their knowledge." Right then I realized the necessity of the most elementary approach of building from the very bottom. Consequently in the last decade I have devoted as much time teaching students how to separate a nuthatch from a woodpecker and a loon from a cormorant as I have in pointing out the simplest method of separating red-breasted from white-breasted nuthatches or red-throated from common loons. The first section of this book outlines the points I stress during every elementary field course in identification. I have limited myself to that area of the United States and southern Canada east of the Great Plains. Ornithologically speaking the hundredth meridian may be considered the dividing line between East and West. At this point many western birds become common. Anyone living in the western half of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and eastern Saskatchewan should own both an eastern and western bird guide. Not all of the species occurring in the chosen area have been in- 3