INTRODUCTION TO WATER BIRDS. 287 



birds are more generally known and acknowledged than that of most 

 others. Their comparatively large size and immense multitudes, render 

 their regular periods of migration (so strenuously denied to some others) 

 notorious along the whole extent of our sea-ooast. Associating, feed- 

 ing, and travelling together in such prodigious and noisy numbers, it 

 would be no less difficult to conceal their arrival, passage and depart- 

 ure, than that of a vast army through a thickly peopled country. Con- 

 stituting also, as many of them do, an article of food and interest to 

 man, he naturally becomes more intimately acquainted with their habits 

 and retreats, than with those feeble and minute kinds, which offer no such 

 inducement, and perform their migrations with more silence in scattered 

 parties, unheeded or overlooked. Hence many of the Waders can be 

 traced from their summer abodes, the desolate regions of Greenland 

 and Spitzbergen, to the fens and seashores of the West India Islands 

 and South America, the usual places of their winter retreat, while those 

 of the Purple Martin and common Swallow still remain, in vulgar beliefs 

 wi'apped up in all the darkness of mystery. 



Philadelphia, March 1st, 1819. 



