ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the “Foreword” of this book I express my grateful appreciation to Dr. A. K. Fisher and Mr. E. H. Forbush for permission to use extracts from published works. I wish to add my thanks to Dr. Charles Richmond and Mr. Joseph Riley of the National Museum of Washington, for their courtesy in furnishing me with bird-skins from the National Museum collections and a copy of the A. O. U. Check-list of 1910, used for the descriptions and ranges of the birds described in the text.
I am indebted to Dr. John M. Clarke, Director of the State Museum of the University of New York, for the permission to make selections from Eaton’s “Birds of New York”; also to Dr. Francis H. Herrick, of Western Reserve University, and Dr. Alexander Wetmore, of the Biological Survey, for the right to quote from their publications.
The selections from John Burroughs, Thoreau, Frank Bolles, Dallas Lore Sharp, Florence Merriam, Olive Thorne Miller, Henry W. Longfellow, E. R. Sill, Celia Thaxter, Lucy Larcom, and Edna Dean Proctor, are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, The Houghton Mifflin Co., the authorized publishers. Three selections from Wilson Flagg’s “Birds of New England” are used by special arrangement with the Page Co. of Boston.
To the Courtesy of D. Appleton & Co. I am indebted for the right to quote one stanza of Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl,” dates and selections from Frank M. Chapman’s “Birds of Eastern North America”; to G. P. Putman’s Sons for the use of three extracts from Dr. Herrick’s “Home Life of Wild Birds,” and to Charles Scribner’s Sons for Henry van Dyke’s rendering of the song sparrow’s song. I acknowledge also with thanks my obligation to Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, for his permission to use six color-plates of the National Association of Audubon Societies and to quote from the Educational Leaflets of the Society.
To my friends, Dallas Lore Sharp, Mrs. Sylvester D. Judd, and Miss Harriet E. Richards, I desire to express my deep appreciation of their suggestions and criticisms. I am indebted to Mr. James P. Chapin, Assistant-Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, for a critical reading of the manuscript.
FOREWORD
John Burroughs, in his delightful essay called “Birds and Poets” says: “The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life—large brained, large lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds,—how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives—and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song.”[1]
Long before the place of birds in the great scheme of nature was understood, they made their appeal: first, to primitive man, who had curious superstitions and created beautiful myths concerning them; next, to poets and dreamers of ancient civilizations, who used them in allusions beautiful with Oriental imagery; to artists, who delighted in portraying symbolism; to later poets and lovers of beauty, who perceived deep truths and revelations of God; and to scientists, who saw back of the phenomena of nature the marvelous laws of God.
It is interesting to follow the effect birds have had upon the development of man. Though the religion of the early Egyptians was largely worship of the sun and moon, yet reverence for birds entered into their faith and their ritual. The swallow, the heron, the hawk, the vulture, the goose, and the ibis were all held sacred. The people of Egypt with their belief in transmigration, imagined the swallow and the heron as possible abiding-places for their souls after death.