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