Field ornithology Author:Elliott Coues Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. REGISTRATION AND LABELLING. §26. A Mere Outline of a field naturalist's duties would be inexcusably incomplete without mention of these importa... more »nt matters; and, because so much of the business of collecting must be left to be acquired in the school of experience, I am the more anxious to give explicit directions whenever, as in this instance, it is possible to do so. §27. Record Tour Observations Daily. In one sense the specimens themselves are your record —primd facie evidence of your industry and ability ; and if labelled, as I shall presently advise, they tell no small part of the whole story. But this is not enough ; indeed, I am not sure that an ably conducted ornithological journal is not the better half of your operations. Under your editorship of labelling specimens tell what they know about themselves ; but you can tell much more yourself. Let us look at a day's work: —You have shot and skinned so many birds and laid them away labelled. You have made observations about them before shooting, and have observed a number of birds that you did not shoot. You have items of haunts and habits, abundance or scarcity; of manners and actions under special circumstances, as of pairing, nesting, laying, rearing young; feeding, migrating and what not; various notes of birds are still ringing in your ears ; and finally, you may have noted the absence of species you saw awhile before, or had expected to occur in your vicinity. Meteorological and topographical items, especially when travelling, are often of great assistance in explaining the occurrences and actions of birds. Now you know these things, but very likely no one else does ; and you know them at the time, but you will not recollect a tithe of them in a few weeks or months, to say nothing of years. Don't trus...« less