THE GULF COAST OF FLORIDA 279 



ish War the Government has carefully protected 

 the nesting grounds of terns, as well as of the 

 boobies, which breed in the vicinity on another 

 Key. Formerly the egg hunters preyed on all 

 at will, supplying annually eggs by the barrel to 

 the Key West market. 



I cannot dwell on the details of the bird life 

 that characterized these keys, except in a gen- 

 eral way ; the eighty different kinds of birds, 

 represented by thousands of individuals, which I 

 saw during my stay of three weeks, are fully dealt 

 with in a paper indicated in the accompanying 

 bibliography. I had come to the Dry Tortugas 

 with the idea that I would see and become ac- 

 quainted with water-birds that were new to me ; 

 but fifty-seven kinds met with were land-birds, a 

 marked preponderance. Therefore it is mainly 

 regarding passeres that my contributions from 

 these remote islands are of value. The conclu- 

 sions I arrived at from watching the migration 

 were that the birds of the Florida peninsula, which 

 have become specialized so as to present tangible 

 characteristics in appearance, are not migratory in 

 a large sense, but are restricted to comparatively 

 limited areas which they do not leave. For in- 

 stance, the white-eyed vireo is a migrant bird in 

 the eastern United States, passing southward to 

 the island of Cuba, and even farther south in the 

 winter, and the white-eyed vireo was a common 



