Getting Ready to Welcome the Birds 



By Henry Turner Bailey 



"I do not wish to think of living where birds cannot live with me. I 

 never have lived in such a place, not even when I roosted on Beacon Hill 

 in the upper story of the great city of Boston." — Dallas Lore Sharp. 



Where do they come from? The usual answer is, "From the South.'' Until 

 recently that vague answer represented about all we were sure of. From how 

 far south? From what regions of the South? By what routes do they come? 

 How long does the journey require? These and many other questions cannot 

 yet be answered with certainty for all kinds of birds. The new trick, the num- 

 bering of birds by means of a metal tag attached to the leg, is helping bird lovers 

 to answer them and to ask others ! 



We know that a few kinds of birds, the owls, downy woodpeckers, English 

 sparrows, and crows, haunt the same locality the year round. A few others, like 

 the chickadee and the robin, seem to stay with us ; but it may be that the Canadian 

 birds winter in the northern states while our own birds are enjoying themselves 

 further south. 



Most of our birds, however, leave us in the fall and return in the spring. 

 Some, like the bluebirds and blackbirds, go only as far as our southern states. 

 The swallows and the swifts go to Mexico and Yucatan. The orioles, the bobo- 

 links, and the redstarts go to Venezuela and Guiana. Some of the warblers who 

 summer in Alaska winter in Brazil. The golden plovers fly from the St. Law- 

 rence, 8,000 miles over-sea to the La Plata! They all have to go for food, the 

 naturalists say. But why should they return ? Do they exhaust the food supply 

 in the south? 



Whatever the reason, back they come, and the whole northern world gives 

 them welcome. Nobody knew how they traveled until an astronomer looking 

 through his telescope at the moon, one night, a few years ago, happened to see 

 the birds crowding one of the great highways of the air. The birds fly mostly 

 in the night, often high up, out of sight. They seem to be guided chiefly by 

 coast lines, and rivers, and mountain chains. 



The New England birds come up the coast to New York and follow the 

 Sound eastward. The Connecticut Valley birds turn northward at Saybrook ; 

 the rest at Narragansett or Buzzards Bay. Some of these follow the Merrimac 

 Valley to the White Mountains, others go on to Maine, and steer inland by means 

 of the Kennebunk and the Penobscot. At last, somehow, they all get back to 

 the places where they were born, so we are told, and since the tagging began, 

 we are quite sure they do, in some cases, at least. 



You have often seen the swallows gathering in late summer, to make the 

 southward journey together. Did you ever see such flocks returning? I was 

 at Katahdin Iron Works, Maine, one spring when the chimney swifts arrived 



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