MIGRATIONS OF THE CLIFF SWALLOW. 151 



MIGRATIONS OF THE CLIFF SWALLOW (Hirundo fusca, VIEILLOT). 



BY J. J. AUDUBON. K. R.S., &C.* 



[The following is the most direct evidence of the actual migration of swallows, which 

 1 have ever met with, though numerous incidental circumstances lead to the same 

 conclusion. EDITOR.] 



ON the Ohio, a new port in Kentucky, by the 27th of July, the 

 young cliff swallows were able to follow their parents. They all exhi- 

 bited the white frontlet, and were scarcely distinguishable in any part 

 of their plumage from the old birds. On the 1st of August, they all 

 assembled near their nests, mounted about three hundred feet in the 

 air, and at ten in the morning took their departure, flying in a loose 

 body, in a direction due north. They returned the same evening about 

 dusk, and continued these excursions, no doubt to exercise their 

 powers, until the third, when, uttering a farewell cry, they shaped the 

 same course at the same hour, and finally disappeared. Shortly after 

 their departure, I was informed that several hundred of their nests 

 were attached to the court house, at the mouth of the Kentucky. They 

 had commenced building there in 1815. A person likewise informed 

 me, that along the cliffs of the Kentucky, he had seen many bunches, 

 as he termed them, of these nests attached to the naked shelving rocks 

 overhanging that river. 



Being extremely desirous of settling the long-agitated question 

 respecting the migration, or supposed torpidity of swallows, I embraced 

 every opportunity of examining their habits, carefully noted their 

 arrival and disappearance, and recorded every fact connected with 

 their history. After some years of constant observation and reflection, 

 I remarked, that among all the species of migratory birds, those that 

 remove farthest from us, depart sooner than those which retire only 

 to the confines of the United States ; and, by a parity of reasoning, 

 those that remain later, return earlier in the spring. These remarks 

 were confirmed, as I advanced towards the south-west on the approach 

 of winter, for I found there numbers of warblers, thrushes, &c., in full 

 feather and song. It was also remarked, that the Hirundo viridis of 

 WILSON, (called by the French of Lower Louisiana, le petit martinet 

 d venire blanc,) remained about the city of New Orleans later than 

 any other swallow. As immense numbers of them were seen during 



*From '^Ornithological Biography.'" 



