106 Coues on the Have, Cliff, or Crescent Swallow. 



April, and had that year finished about fifty nests by the 20th of 

 the same month. The next year, namely, 1820, Major Long and 

 Sir John Franklin found these birds again, in widely remote re- 

 gions, — the first named during his expedition to the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, and the latter on the journey from Cumberland House to 

 Fort Enterprise, and on the banks of Point Lake, in latitude 65°, 

 where its earliest arrival was noted the following year on the 12th 

 of June. Dr. Richardson says that their clustered nests are of 

 frequent occurrence on the faces of cliffs of the Barren Grounds, and 

 not uncommon throughout the course of the Slave and Mackenzie's 

 Rivers ; and that their first appearance at Fort Chipewyan was on 

 the 25th of June, 1825. Major Long's discovery was named 

 II ir undo lunifrons by Say in 1823 ; and the following year Audu- 

 bon published his hitherto MS. name respublicana in the Annals of 

 the New York Lyceum of Natural History, with some remarks on 

 the species, in connection with some observations of Governor De 

 Witt Clinton, who called the bird 11 ir undo opifex. Meanwhile, 

 Vieillot had described the West Indian conspecies as Hirundo 

 fulva ; and the future Prince Bonaparte adopted this name for our 

 species in 1825. Thus in the short space of two years, 1823 - 25, 

 the interesting Anonyma, " Xo. 35," before known only by num- 

 ber, like the striped inmates of some of our penal establishments, 

 suddenly became quite a lion, with titles galore in the binomial 

 haul ton. But it was not till 1850 that it was actually raised to 

 the sublime degree of Petrochelidun, though it had long been taken 

 and held to be a master-mason. 



The Cliff Swallow has been supposed by some to be an immigrant 

 of comparatively recent date in the Eastern L T nited States ; but it 

 does not appear that any broad theory of a general progressive 

 eastward extension is fairly deductible from the evidence we possess. 

 On the contrary, much of the testimony is merely indicative of the 

 dates, when, in various parts of the country, the birds began to 

 build under eaves, and so established colonies where none existed 

 before ; and some of the evidence opposes the view just mentioned. 

 The Swallows, as a rule, are birds of local distribution in the breed- 

 ing season, notwithstanding their pre-eminent migratory abilities; 

 they tend to settle in particular places, and return year after year ; 

 and nothing is better known than that one town may be full of 

 Swallows of several kinds unknown in another town hard by. I 

 suppose the real meaning of the record is " only this and nothing 



