William L. Baily

The Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio differs in a number of ways -- besides its dimensions -- from earlier editions of The Birds of America and from John James Audubon's original, massive Double-Elephant Folio, the heaviest volume of which weighs 56 pounds. These plates are organized not in the order that Audubon produced them for his subscribers but phylogenetically; that is, in a modern scientific classification sequence that somewhat parallels the evolutionary history of a genetically related group of organisms -- from the most primitive living examples to the most recently evolved -- in this case going from loons to sparrows and buntings. The numbering of our plates follows the taxonomical sequence of orders, families, and species in the Check-List of North American Birds prepared by the American Ornithologists' Union, as adapted and up-dated by the American Birding Association.