Excerpt from Our Birds and Their Nestlings In most cases they are birds of conspicuous plumage, these being most easily recognised. To avoid monotomy, all decriptions have been relegated to the appendix. An attempt has been made to enlist sympathy with, as well as to awaken interest in, bird life, for the interest without sympathy, in this case, would only encourage the naturally destructive instincts of childhood. For the purpose of showing the importance of birds in literature, as well as for the purpose of calling into play the aesthetic faculty, poems and legends have been included. All hackneyed poems have been avoided. For their generous permission to use valuable copy-righted material, intebtedness is gratefully acknowledged to Houghton, Miffin & Co., Small, Maynard & Co., D. Appleton & Co., and Our Dumb Animals Publishing Co.; to Mrs. Margaret Sangster, Mr. Eben Rexford, Mr. Clinton Scollard, and Mr. Frank Dempster Sherman. For the photographic illustrations, I am especially indebted to Mr. Francis Hobart Herrick, an earnest bird student and an enthusiastic photographer, who has kindly permitted me the use of some of the remarkably fine photographs used in illustrating his interesting book, The Home Life of Wild Birds, a book with which all bird students are already familiar. Mr. Frank M. Chapman, Mr. A. R. Dugmore, Mr. John Cameron, Miss Ruth Shutts, Mr. James Miller, and the Recreation Publishing Co., have also assisted me in the same way. Want of space precludes the individual mention of a number of my associates to whom I am indebted for both counsel and good-natured critism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."