Excerpt from Michigan Bird Life: A List of All the Bird Species Known to Occur in the State Together With an Outline of Their Classification and an Account of the Life History of Each Species, With Special Reference to Its Relation to Agriculture The last general work on Michigan birds was prepared by Professor A. J. Cook and published in 1893 as Bulletin 94 of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station. It professed to be little more than a list of the birds of the state, with some indication of distribution and abundance, but without descriptions of plumage and with only occasional reference to habits. Limited as was its scope it was a welcome contribution to our bird literature, and since the supply was exhausted, in 1900, requests for another bulletin have been received in ever increasing numbers. The present work has been prepared in response to a demand not only for an authoritative list of Michigan birds but for such additional infor mation about each species as would be useful and interesting. Perhaps it is too much to hope that this demand will be fully satisfied by the present volume, but an examination of its pages will show that an attempt has been made to give the main facts in the life history of each bird found in the state, although in many cases the material has been so abundant that much was necessarily omitted, and the remainder closely condensed. The primary aim has been to put this information in such form as to make it readily intelligible to the average citizen; not too technical to be readily understood by the layman, nor so elementary as to suggest the nature study primer. With the hope that the book might appeal to the student and teacher, as well as to the nature lover and general reader, careful descriptions of all species have been incorporated and artificial keys are provided so that any person with a freshly killed bird, or a prepared specimen in hand, may be able to trace it out and classify it just as some of us learned to name flowers in the days when such work was believed to be a necessary part of any course in botany. Most of these keys have been tested for several years with college classes, and while far from perfect they will be found workable in most cases. They differ from other similar keys in the greater use made of measure ments, and the lesser dependence placed on mere color, which varies greatly in some species with age, season and sex. Those interested in the use of these keys will find suggestions and explanations on pages 12 to 20 of the introduction. 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.