The Honey-Guides (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Honey-Guides Similarly, it was impossible to compare the parasitic breeding habits of the honey-guides with those of the cowbirds, cuckoos, and other brood parasites until more information was available. It was essential to make such comparisons, and hence it was necessary to find out more about the honey-guides. In the pages that follow I have brought together all that is known of these birds from the literature, from museum specimens, from the unprinted observations of many naturalists in Africa, and from my own personal field studies. If at times it may seem that unnecessary detail has been set forth I would remind the reader that our studies are still in the fact-finding stage, and that some of these possibly tedious minutiae may turn out to be revealing and significant in the light of further data on the one hand, and, on the other, may help to qualify or to support some of the statements derived from them and other similar crumbs of evidence. Throughout, every effort has been made to integrate all available knowledge, even when that integration is still on the merely suggestive level. In a field where the gaps in knowledge and in the evidence are so numerous, it seems better to venture occasionally with an interpretation or an opinion not yet wholly provable by the actual data than to follow the safer, but intellectually sterile, course of attempting to understand nothing because it is not yet possible to understand all. In each of these ventures I have tried to point out clearly that the interpretations are tentative, and quite possibly of more temporary than permanent validity. I consider them important and useful because they will serve to direct further inquiries and to arouse more searching question ings. Also, since few of the naturalists resident in Africa and the appropriate parts of Asia have the chance to know the species of the family not found in their own special areas, they are not in a position to apply the data on one or two species to the problems arising from other related forms elsewhere except through the medium of a com prehensive and integrated report. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.