INTRODUCTION
.- My approach in this book is very similar to that in class--that the principles and
methods of science can be taught through birds. And as in class， I am not partic-
ularly interested in the learning of long strings of facts about birds but rather
the reasons and underlying forces that give rise to the various forms， behaviors，
and distributions we see in birds. In doing so 1 follow the format of more schol-
arly texts in a number of areas: The metric system is used exclusively in the pre-
sentation of measurements [See the table of conversions following this
lntroduction.--Ed.]， species names are capitalized and followed in italic by their
scientific name， and the text is referenced by giving the author and date of pub-
lication. The referencing， I feel， is important for a number of reasons: It recog-
nizes the authors from which I take information， adds a certain credibility to
the text， and most importantly， allows the reader to find out more about a par-
ticular area of ornithology. Knowing that many of these references are rather
obscure and available only in university libraries， I have ended each chapter
with suggested reading of more accessible works. I encourage the reader to con-
tinue the study of ornithology and hope that my text and additional sources
will be helpful to this end.
The projects presented at the end of chapters are also there to encourage the
reader to find out more about birds. Probably more than any other science，
ornithology has a strong tradition of contribution by the nonscientist. Some of
these projects suggest no more than becoming more systematic in the observa-
tions you probably make already， while others require a good deal of time and
~patience. 1 have tried most of them with my classes with varying degrees of suc-
cess， finding that even the best laid plans don t always work out. Don t get dis-
\"~ouraged if your experimental designs don t work， either; but if they do， you
should *consider your work for publication. Ornithological journals such as
W~lson s Bullei~n， Condor， Kingbird， and Journal of Field Ornithology all give the
~peciflcatlons .for publication in every issue， and all accept both longer articles
arid shorter contributions. So become an ornithologist.
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