In looking back over the preparation of these sketches I feel as though
each evening I'd gathered up the bits and pieces left over from the
day's work and fashioned them into designs for my own amusement and the
edification of my family. Truly it's as though I'd used stray feathers,
fallen from the bird skins I'd handled, and fitted them together into
something of wider interest than the original.
Much of my work now is museum research, working with bird specimens
and books. In fashioning a research paper I always amass a great deal
more material, that is to say, information and ideas, than I am able
to use in it. In place of a lumber room I have a set of files with
index headings that range from Abundance and Age, through such headings
as Beauty, Feathering of Feet, Fictitious, Hysteria, Pterylography,
Social, Song, Tail Feathers, Valentine's Day, to Zoogeography. Here
I put the information that is irrelevant at the moment but too
interesting to discard. Its source is varied. Some has been accumulated
while studying specimens from localities as geographically separated as
Alaska, El Salvador, Gabon, Tristan da Cunha, Nepal, Negros, and New
Guinea; and while writing papers that range from describing new species
to discussing secondary sexual characters and ecological competition.
Some have been recorded while in the field on expeditions, trips that
ranged from two years in Madagascar, three expeditions in New Guinea,
and a season in the Philippines to trips nearer home from the Yukon to
Nova Scotia, Florida, and Central America.
Gradually information builds up under each heading, and new ones are
added. These items are too interesting to remain buried in the files.
They are things people want to know about. So I began to draft them
into articles for publication in the museum's monthly, _The Chicago
Natural History Museum Bulletin_. The response was gratifying. The
press picked them up and reprinted them. One was used in a Chicago
_Tribune_ editorial. Several were used in commercial radio programs.
Encouraged, I prepared more, soon overrunning the space available in
the bulletin.
Most scientific papers are not written to be read for enjoyment.
Conciseness as well as clarity are striven for, conveying certain
information in a small compass. The correlations made are often obscure
ones, appreciated only by scientists. Yet the material they contain
is often intensely interesting, and if these papers were written in
a more leisurely style, with more general correlations pointed out,
they would provide both interesting and entertaining reading. In a few
cases my own research falls in this class, and I've rewritten some of
my own papers with this in mind (_see_ "Battle of the Sexes and Its
Evolutionary Significance").
This collection of articles, if it were a painting, could be called a
conversation piece. Or it might be compared to a well-filled whatnot.
Each of the sixty chapters is an independent unit, illustrating some
facet of birds, their behavior, or our study of them. Some of the facts
may seem unusual or bizarre, but most of them are well known and well
documented. The thing that is new, if there is anything new, is the
setting in which I've placed them, the manner in which I've looked at
them. Taken as a whole, they touch on many different birds from many
different places in their less widely known aspects, and with a human
interest slant.
"But what will your professional colleagues say?" asked a friend as
he flipped through the cartoons. "These pictures don't approach the
subject in a very serious manner." Quite true. But a discipline must
be very lightly rooted indeed if it can't stand a few caricatures and
cartoons and perhaps be the better for them.
The knowledge of most people about the hornbills of tropical Africa,
the gulls of Australia, the penguins of Antarctica, and the crocodile
birds of the Nile is probably pretty vague. To give a frame of
reference in a biological sense is impractical in the compass of one
slim volume.
But a ready-made frame of reference already exists: the parallels in
bird and in human. These I have used. But in so doing I am not imputing
human motives and attributes to birds. The actions are similar. The
workings of the human mind I understand only vaguely; that of the
bird I can study only through the actions of the birds. One set of
behavior may be learned and rational, one rigidly innate, entirely
instinctive, and inherited, or at most modified by experience. Be that
as it may, the similarity in the end result in two such different
vertebrate animals as man and bird when faced with similar problems is
often close. Perhaps it is because the solutions are necessarily few;
perhaps, and I incline to this feeling, it helps illustrate one aspect
of the close relationship between all animate nature.
This series of articles is intended to be interesting and entertaining.
I hope it will also make more people aware of the many ways birds
act, here and in far places, how they have solved their problems and
profited by their opportunities.