TO THE READER.
Do you want to know the birds and call them by their familiar names? You may do so if you will, provided you have keen eyes and a pocket full of patience; patience is the salt of the bird-catching legend.
The flowers silently await your coming, from the wayside wild rose to the shy orchid entrenched in the depths of the cool bog, and you may examine and study them at your leisure. With the birds it is often only a luring call, a scrap of melody, and they are gone. Yet in spite of this you may have a bowing and even a speaking acquaintance with them.
The way is plain for those who wish to study the science of ornithology and have time to devote to the pursuit; its literature is exhaustive, and no country offers a more interesting variety of species than our own. But for the novice, who wishes to identify easily the birds that surround him, to recognize their songs and give them their English names, the work at first seems difficult. There are many scientific terms, containing their own definitions, that lose force and exactness when translated into simpler language, requiring a dozen words to give the meaning of one. There is a comforting fact, however, for the novice, that while scientific nomenclature has been and is constantly changing, the common names, that science also recognizes, remain practically unchanged. Our Bluebird bears the same name as in Audubon’s day, and the Meadowlark, who has been moved from one genus to another, is called the Meadowlark still.
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