This collection of articles, if it were a painting, could be called a conversation piece. Or it might be compared to a well-filled whatnot. Each of the sixty chapters is an independent unit, illustrating some facet of birds, their behavior, or our study of them. Some of the facts may seem unusual or bizarre, but most of them are well known and well documented. The thing that is new, if there is anything new, is the setting in which I've placed them, the manner in which I've looked at them. Taken as a whole, they touch on many different birds from many different places in their less widely known aspects, and with a human interest slant. "But what will your professional colleagues say?" asked a friend as he flipped through the cartoons. "These pictures don't approach the subject in a very serious manner." Quite true. But a discipline must be very lightly rooted indeed if it can't stand a few caricatures and cartoons and perhaps be the better for them. The knowledge of most people about the hornbills of tropical Africa, the gulls of Australia, the penguins of Antarctica, and the crocodile birds of the Nile is probably pretty vague. To give a frame of reference in a biological sense is impractical in the compass of one slim volume. But a ready-made frame of reference already exists: the parallels in bird and in human. These I have used. But in so doing I am not imputing human motives and attributes to birds. The actions are similar. The workings of the human mind I understand only vaguely; that of the bird I can study only through the actions of the birds. One set of behavior may be learned and rational, one rigidly innate, entirely instinctive, and inherited, or at most modified by experience. Be that as it may, the similarity in the end result in two such different vertebrate animals as man and bird when faced with similar problems is often close. Perhaps it is because the solutions are necessarily few; perhaps, and I incline to this feeling, it helps illustrate one aspect of the close relationship between all animate nature. This series of articles is intended to be interesting and entertaining. I hope it will also make more people aware of the many ways birds act, here and in far places, how they have solved their problems and profited by their opportunities. STRAY FEATHERS FROM A BIRD MAN'S DESK BIRDS USING TOOLS [Illustration] Man is the tool user pre-eminent in the animal world, but he does not stand completely alone in this. Here and there, in quite different groups of animals such as insects, mammals, and birds, a few kinds have forged a little ahead of the rest of their near relatives and show the very beginning of tool using.