140 THE MIGRATIONS OF BIRDS 



to traverse the entire route. Many wood warblers 

 pursue this course in both spring and autumn, and 

 are found abundantly in passage. More popular is 

 the direct line from Florida to Cuba and Jamaica, 

 with a long stretch of five hundred miles which 

 reaches across the Caribbean Sea to the coasts of 

 Colombia and Venezuela. Our bobolink, trans- 

 formed in fall into a dull-colored, sparrowlike reed- 

 bird or rice-bird, seeks this line of flight and seldom 

 varies far from it, as only once has it been recorded 

 east as far as Vieques Island east of Porto Rico. The 

 chuck-wills-widow, a whippoorwill-like bird of the 

 southeastern states, in part crosses this route, 

 though some individuals remain to winter in the 

 West Indies. Yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, 

 the gray-cheeked thrush, the bank swallow, and 

 the black-poll warbler, may traverse this road, but 

 on the whole it is not popular except with the bobo- 

 link. 



Fear of a sea-passage cannot account for the com- 

 paratively small number of birds that cross the 

 Caribbean Sea from Cuba, since to the westward 

 from Florida to Texas the path of the main flight of 

 birds that passes to Central America leads across the 

 width of the Gulf of Mexico to Yucatan and Vera 

 Cruz, a journey necessitating navigation of an open 

 area of sea as broad as the Caribbean. This route 

 seems to receive migrants that pass south through 



