Produced by Lesley Halamek, Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Mark Orton (for the Formatting Template), and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note. ^ indicates a superscript. _text_ indicates italic type. =text= indicates bold type. A missing line on Page 25 (_in italics_) (Their wings are paddles, being flattened and devoid of quills. _The wings are not folded, but are carried hanging awkwardly at_ the side.) was restored from a different Edition on Google Books (http:// books.google.com/books?id=Rn3uthhODo8C&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25). Sundry damaged or missing punctuation has been repaired, and a few index entries have been amended. The use of hyphens was not necessarily consistent throughout this book. In some instances there are subtle differences in meaning. Some Australian/British spellings (e.g. coloured, defence, draught, grey, learnt, lustre, etc.) have been retained, though color/colored and gray are more prevalent. The Author has used various resources. From Wikipedia: "DR JOHN ALBERT LEACH (19 March 1870 - 3 October 1929) was an ornithologist, teacher and headmaster in the state of Victoria, Australia. Leach was born in Ballarat, Victoria and educated at Creswick Grammar School (where he was dux), Melbourne Training College (1890) and the University of Melbourne, where he graduated B.Sc. in 1904, M.Sc. in 1906 and in 1912 obtained his doctorate for research in ornithology. Leach was a regular writer and broadcaster on natural history subjects and introduced it into the school curriculum. He was President of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) 1922-1924 and Editor of its journal The Emu 1914-1924 and 1928-1929. He was a member of the British Ornithologists Union and a corresponding fellow of the American Ornithologists Union. Leach was also member of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. He was instrumental in founding the Gould League of Bird Lovers in 1909 with Jessie McMichael. He is best known as the author of An Australian Bird Book, the first edition of which was published in 1911, and of Australian Nature Studies in 1922. He also part-authored a series of Federal Geography books, and worked on the Official Checklist of the Birds of Australia second and revised edition, published by the RAOU in September 1926. Leach had been preparing two books before his death, one of these was a collection of weekly radio broadcasts he made on 3LO in the mid 1920s.... Among his contributions to ornithology was the relationship between the Australian Magpie, butcherbirds and currawongs in the family Cracticidae, now sunk as a subfamily into Artamidae." This book is a field guide. The pages were divided vertically, with the tabular matter on the top half, and the Lecture on the bottom half of the page.