Additions to the List of the Birds of Louisiana

Oberholser's 'Bird Life of Louisiana' (La. Dept. Conserv. Bull. 28, 1938), was a notable contribution to the ornithology of the Gulf Coast region and the lower Mississippi Valley, for it gave not only a complete distributional synopsis of every species and subspecies of bird then known to occur in Louisiana but also nearly every record of a Louisiana bird up to 1938. However, at the time of the appearance of this publication, one of the most active periods in Louisiana ornithology was just then beginning. The bird collection in the Louisiana State University Museum of Zoölogy had been started only the year before, and the first comprehensive field work since the time of Beyer, Kohn, Kopman, and Allison, two decades before, was still in its initial stage. Since 1938 the Museum of Zoölogy has acquired more specimens of birds from Louisiana than were collected there in all of the years prior to that time. Many parts of the state have been studied where no previous work at all had been done. Also in the last eight years some capable ornithologists have visited the state as students at Louisiana State University, and each has contributed greatly to the mass of new data now available. Despite the excellence of Oberholser's compilation of records, it is, therefore, not surprising that even at this early date twenty-four additions can be made to the list of birds known from Louisiana. Furthermore, this recently acquired information permits the emendation of the recorded status of scores of species, each previously ascribed to the state on the basis of comparatively meager data.