Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let

you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume,

take a nice deep breath in,

let it out slowly,

and off we go

This evening we're relaxing with bird biographies a Guidebook for Beginners, an Introduction to 150 Common Landbirds of the Eastern United States by Alice E. Ball, author of A Year with the Birds.

Illustrated by Robert Bruce Horsfall, painter of backgrounds and habitat groups at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, with 56 colored plates, published by Dodd Mead and Company, New York,

1923.

Let's begin.

To my friend Elizabeth Jones, in loving acknowledgement of her untiring aid, unwavering faith and inspiring criticism, This book is dedicated.

Forward.

John Burrows in his delightful essay called Birds and Poets says,

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet.

A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense in his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

The beautiful vagabonds endowed with every grace, masters of all climbs and knowing no bounds.

How many human aspirations are realized in their free holiday lives, and how many suggestions

to the poet in their flight and song.

Long before the place of birds in the great scheme of nature was understood,

they made their appeal. first to primitive man who had curious superstitions and created beautiful

myths concerning them.

...