The Red-breasted Sheldrake and Black-capped Chickadee, winter residents, were also observed.
Those interested in bird migration will, we hope, read our “Notes” with interest. We wish to thank those who forwarded reports for their aid; and would be pleased to receive reports from all. Those wishing to aid us in this department and sending us their address will have the necessary blanks sent them.
Our home reports are meager, owing to the extreme lateness of spring.
To secure insertion, the reports should be sent not later than the 15th of each month.
CONCHOLOGY.
For The Hawkeye O. and O. HOW TO COLLECT AND PREPARE CONCHOLOGICAL SPECIMENS.
BY J. A. SINGLEY.
The editors having given me permission to ride my “hobby,” I intend to give brief but full instructions on the above as well as make a few remarks on matters connected with a collection. There are many collectors who can profit by what I write, but these notes are intended mainly for the class to which I belonged about 23 years ago, i. e.: the young collector and the beginner. Had I had these instructions then it would have saved me many a false step aside from doing some things that, while not very serious mistakes, might be called “verdant.”
I want, in the first place, to point out the advantages of collecting shells. Collecting can be done all the year round in many localities; and on the sea-shore there is no intermission. There is no climbing of trees as in egg collecting, and no danger of broken bones. Shells are not easily broken, are much handsomer than eggs; and, best of all, a shell always carries its name about with it, while you must take your correspondent’s word for the egg. And tho’ some oologists profess to be able to identify a species by the egg alone, I am bound to say that after several years of professional collecting in oology, that in the majority of cases a species can not be determined from the eggs.