Summer Birds of Broadhead's Creek, Monroe Co., Pa. 



BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT 



In the northern part of Monroe county, where the Pocono 

 plateau breaks down into lower lands that roll eastward to the 

 Delaware, is a country that I love. Here at Buck Hill Falls, 

 in a shack in the woods on a low mountain, fifteen hundred 

 feet above tide-water, I spent the three months, June 15-Sep- 

 tember 15, 1905. The forest about the shack was burnt through 

 a little more than twenty years ago and is grown up again into 

 a fairly open woods of rock-oak, chestnut and hickory. Only 

 here and there are left trees of the previous forest, and there is 

 comparatively little undergrowth on the mountain-top, save 

 where the trees have been cut to make way for cottages. There 

 is one cleared space where a farmer lived and worked a few 

 fields before the Friends made a summer settlement there. The 

 building of some seventy cottages has altered somewhat condi- 

 tions in these woods; it has driven away some birds and brought 

 in others, but, as yet, no English Sparrows. 



When we arrived on the evening of June 15, you might have 

 supposed you were deep in the woods, so loud was the dusk 

 with Whip-poor-wills and Ovenbirds and Chebecs.* As we 

 climbed the steps of our shack a Robin fluttered out from her 

 nest under the porch roof, and next morning I found two de- 

 serted Pewee'sf nests plastered on the timbers underneath the 

 shack, which was raised high from the ground and left open 

 below so that the birds could pass in and out at will. It was 

 slow work going to sleep that first night, tired as we were, so 

 incessant were the Whip-poor-wills; in the very heart of the 

 night I awakened to the flight song of an Ovenbird; in the gray 

 hours the Wood Pewees began to call; and then the Chebecs 



* Empidonax viinimus. 

 f Sayornis phoehe. 



(6) 



