BACHMAN'S SPARROW 957 



In his description John Audubon (1834) writes: "In honoiu-ing so 

 hiunble an object as this Finch wdth the name of Bachman, my aim 

 is to testify the high regard in which I hold that learned and most 

 estimable indixddual * * * ." John Bachman discovered this species 

 and obtained the first specimens on the Edisto River, about 30 miles 

 west of Charieston, S.C., at Parker's Ferry (erroneously cited by 

 some later \\Titers as Harper's Ferry), but Audubon himself took the 

 specimens, upon which he based his description, within 6 miles of 

 Charleston and later found others in clearings at various points along 

 the main highway north of the city. 



To anyone familiar with the present-day pine woods of coastal 

 South Carolina, where Bachman's sparrows may be heard singing in 

 every sizable patch of pines, it is inexplicable that so keen an ob- 

 server as John Bachman had to go far afield to discover them. Per- 

 haps, as by his oavti admission he had mistaken the song for that of 

 the towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalrnus) , he had consistently overlooked 

 them nearer to home. It is certain, though, that Bachman's sparrow 

 was not nearly as numerous in the 1830s as it had become by 1905 

 when this Aviiter first roamed the woods of the Charleston area. It 

 is not difficult to account for the increase in its nimibers. 



In John Audubon's time virgin pine forest covered coastal South 

 Carolina except immediately arovmd the cities and towns. So close 

 and dense was this growth that there was little or no underbrush and 

 the ground was bare except for a clean mat of pine needles. The 

 only cover or food available for ground-ranging birds was along the 

 infrequent edges. I can weU remember in the middle 1890s, before 

 the great lumber companies had completed their desolation of the 

 \'irgin forests of the South, that the railroads out of Charleston ran 

 for miles at a stretch through unbroken pine forests. But the de- 

 struction of the great pineries and the subsequent springing up of a 

 fairly open second growth with a ground cover of grasses and under- 

 brush gave Bachman's sparrow an almost unlimited territory favor- 

 able to its expansion. The increase in its numbers may well have 

 paralleled that of the chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica) when the 

 building up of the eastern part of the nation provided an abundance 

 of chimney nesting sites to replace the comparatively few hollow 

 trees that had, until then, held the numbers of that species severely 

 in check. 



There can be no doubt of the almost explosive increase in numbers 

 because, before the close of the nineteenth century, Bachman's 

 sparrow had become so common throughout the southeast that it had 

 to expand into areas that had never known it before — Tennessee, 

 Kentucky, West Virginia, and even southern Ohio and southwestern 

 Pennsylvania. Maurice Brooks (1938) gives a detailed account of 



