Author: George E. Beyer

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9781332103102

Excerpt from The Avifauna of Louisiana: With an Annotated List of the Birds of the State Although the natural history of the birds of North America in general, as well as that of several of the individual states of our Union, has been well worked up time and again, no effort, so far as I have been able to ascertain, has been made to define the extent and distribution of feathered life within the limits of Louisiana, almost all material in ornithology pertaining to the state having been incorporated with other and more general working on the subject. We find the earliest account of the bird-fauna of Louisiana in Le Page du Pratz's "Histoire de la Louisiane," published in Paris in 1758. This early historian of our state devotes a part of his second volume to an account of the plant and animal life as it appeared to him, an untutored naturalist. One chapter only treats, in a rather crude but quaint way, of the birds. His descriptions, of course, are not only faulty, and in many ways exaggerated, but his list falls far short of the number of species known to us at the present day. Le Page only mentions and describes about 36 species, which he also endeavored to represent by illustrations. It was well that he had the forethought to furnish these illustrations with the names of the birds they were intended to represent. I am sure that the Parisians of the time must have been strongly impressed with the wonderful grotesqueness of the birds of Louisiana. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of Le Page, we must certainly give him the credit of being, even up to this day, the only naturalist who has confined himself strictly to Louisiana in the treatment of his subject. 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.