330 POPULAE SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rate of from 45 to 52 miles an hour. The longest recorded flight of a 

 carrier pigeon was from Pensacola, Florida, to Fall Eiver, Mass., an 

 air-line distance of 1,183 miles, made in I5I/2 days or only about 76 

 miles a day. 



Herr Gatke, whose observations on Heligoland, a small island in 

 the North Sea, extended over a period of fifty years, would give to 

 birds a speed that is incredible. For example, the gray crows were 

 believed by him to pass over the 360 miles between Heligoland and 

 Lincolnshire at a rate of 120 miles an hour, and curlews, godwits and 

 plovers are said by him to cross from Heligoland to the oyster beds 

 lying to the eastward, a distance of a little more than 4 miles, in one 

 minute, or at the astonishing rate of 240 miles an hour. The error 

 in these observations, as suggested by Newton ('Dictionary of Birds,' p. 

 566), probably lies in the impossibility of identifying the individuals 

 that leave one of the given points with those first arriving at the other 

 end of the line. Professor Newton also calls attention to the fact 

 that few birds, even swallows and quail, fly as fast as an express train 

 from whose windows they may be observed. It is a common experience, 

 when a train is passing along at no great speed, for various birds to 

 be flushed by it, but after flying vigorously for a few hundred yards 

 they quickly drop behind. 



But granting that the occasional speed is very considerable, the 

 actual speed of most migrating birds appears to be surprisingly low. 

 Observations tending to prove this were made some years ago under 

 the direction of Prof. W. W. Cook, in the Mississippi Valley. The 

 services of over one hundred observers were enlisted, at stations ranging 

 from the Gulf to Manitoba. The date at which a certain species was 

 first noted at the most southern point was compared with the first 

 appearance of that species at the most northern point; the distance in 

 miles between these two stations is then divided by the number of days 

 between the observations. Thus the Baltimore oriole was first seen at 

 Rodney, Mississippi, April 7, and was not observed at Oak Point, 

 Manitoba, until May 25. The distance in a straight line between 

 these two places is 1,298 miles and as it took 48 days the average speed 

 was 27 miles a day. The records of fifty-eight species for the spring 

 of 1883 gave an average speed of 23 miles a day for an average dis- 

 tance of 420 miles, while in the following year a slightly smaller num- 

 ber of species gave exactly the same average speed over an average dis- 

 tance of 861 miles. In the case of individual species the results were 

 of much interest. Thus the robin, cowbird and yellowhammer traveled 

 at an average speed of about 12 miles a day, while the average for the 

 summer redbird, ruby-throated humming bird and night hawk was 28 

 miles a day. It is, however, necessary to take so many things into 

 account in arriving at these conclusions that it is easy to see the possi- 



