airplane in Mesopotamia reported that swifts easily circled his ship 

 when it was traveling at 68 miles an hour. To do this, the birds cer- 

 tainly were flying at a speed as high as lOO miles an hour. Once a 

 hunting duck hawk, timed with a stop watch, was calculated to have 

 attained a speed between 165 and 180 miles an hour. 



The speed of migration, however, is quite different from that at- 

 tained in forced flights for short distances. A sustained flight of 10 

 hours a day would carry herons, hawks, crows, and smaller birds from 

 100 to 250 miles, while ducks and geese might travel as much as 400 

 to 500 miles in the same period. Measured as air-line distances, these 

 journeys are impressive and indicate that birds could cover the ordinary 

 migration route from the northern United States or even from northern 

 Canada to winter quarters in the West Indies or in Central America 

 or South America in a relatively short time. It is probable that in- 

 dividual birds do make flights of the length indicated and that barn 

 swallows seen in May on Beata Island, off the southern coast of the 

 Dominican Republic, may have reached that point after a nonstop 

 flight of 350 miles across the Caribbean Sea from the coast of Vene- 

 zuela. Nevertheless, whether they continue such journeys day after 

 day is doubtful. 



It seems more likely that migrations are performed in a leisurely 

 manner, and that after a flight of a few hours the birds pause to feed 

 and rest for one or several days, particularly if they find themselves in 

 congenial surroundings. Some indication of this is found in the rec- 

 ords of banded birds, particularly waterfowl. Considering only the 

 shortest intervals that have elapsed between banding in the North and 

 recovery in southern regions, it is found that usually a month or more 

 is taken to cover an air-line distance of a thousand miles. For example, 

 a black duck banded at Lake Scugog, Ontario, was killed 12 days later 

 at Vicksburg, Miss. If the bird was taken shortly after its arrival, the 

 record would indicate an average daily flight of only 83 miles, a distance 

 that could have been covered in about 2 hours' flying time. Among 

 the thousands of banding records obtained in recent years, evidences 

 of such rapid flight are decidedly scarce, for with few exceptions all 

 thousand-mile flights have required 2 to 4 weeks or more. Among 

 sportsmen, the blue-winged teal is well known as a fast-flying duck 

 and quite a few of these banded on Canadian breeding grounds have 

 covered 2,300 to 3,000 miles in a 30-day period. Nevertheless, the ma- 

 jority of those that have traveled to South America were not recovered 



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