The Ridgway Ornithological Club of Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A, Vol. 1: Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Ridgway Ornithological Club of Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A, Vol. 1: Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley

As the weather during the first six weeks of this year did not permit excur sions to new fields, I contented myself with revisiting the ground gone over in December, to see what had become of my little friends enumerated in my New Year's report.

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Excerpt from The Ridgway Ornithological Club of Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A, Vol. 1: Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley

During the Spring of 1882 a series of observations on the migration of birds in the Mississippi Valley was conducted under my supervision. The notes collected were published in the Forest and Stream during October and November of that year. A more extended series has been successfully conducted the past Spring, and it is intended in these articles to give the full notes from two points in the Mississippi Valley, namely, St. Louis, Mo., the observer here being Mr. O. Widmann, 4024 Carondelet Avenue; and Jefferson, Wis., where I was living the past year. This is done that these notes may serve not only as guides to future observers in determining when to look for each species, but as showing how necessary it is that observations to be atall satisfactory, should be full, accurate, taken almost daily, and connected with a careful record of the meteorology of the place of observation

Full as these notes are, compared with the large majority of Spring notes, a careful study of them will show how much more valuable they would have been had they been connected with a third station mid-way between, and if in connection with them could be had an exact weather report from a place one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles south of St. Louis; since, of course, it will be readily granted by all, that it is not the weather of the place of arrival which controls the movements of our birds except in rare cases but rather the atmospheric conditions of the place from which the bird starts on its migratory flight.

To make the record of these two stations as intelligible as possible, it is deemed best to describe the character of the country in full, and the conditions under which the observations were made.

The ground worked in St. Louis was the south end of the city, along the west bank of the Mississippi, which is here about seventy-five to a hundred feet high, and the top of which consists of a long series of sink holes or shallow pits of a quarter to half an acre in extent, densely overgrown with bushes and low trees. The whole southern part of St. Louis is well supplied with shrubs and large trees, furnishing convenient stopping places for our feathered travelers, but the greater part of the notes were made in the heavy timber which skirts the banks of the River des Peres, a small stream which marks the city limits on the west and then turning toward the east enters the Mississippi a little way south of the city. In these woods the observer was alone with Nature and the birds, and, though so near the city, yet was as free from interruption and disturbance as if in the big woods of the Northwest. Opposite St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river, are extensive lowlands overgrown by willows and heavy underbrush. Occasional visits were paid to these places, but the notes there taken have always been credited to Illinois, and no notes are credited to St. Louis unless they were actually made on the Missouri side of the river.

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.