Some Birds of Brown's Mills, N. J. 



BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT 



Old years brought back bj' killdeer calls; swallows that dared 

 our northern March; the ripening of a friendship for Phie- 

 warblers — these are the ornithological experiences that stand 

 out in memory as I look back upon our week at Brown's Mills- 

 iu-the-Pines, March 27-April 3, 1907. Brown's Mills lie just 

 within the pine barrens that cover New Jersey, southeastward 

 of a line drawn from Sandy Hook to Salem. The Rancocas 

 Creek, dammed here, spreads out into a little forked lake, from 

 which two considerable branches extend eastward through low- 

 treed sand wastes and cedar and cranberry swamps. The ab- 

 sence of bird life in these barrens, though it was migration time, 

 was more striking than the presence of any birds. Follow the 

 narrow trails back into them in any direction, at any time of 

 day, you would see little life even along the streams. Above you 

 Turkey Buzzards were always circling, but what they found to 

 feed on, where the few piners that lived hereabouts could barely 

 scratch a living, is hard to tell. Save for the low sough of the 

 wind in the pines that scarcely ever ceased, the buzz of the Pine 

 Warblers' song, first from this tree, then from that, and the con- 

 stant shrilling of the Snowbirds from bush and ground, there 

 was generally in these early spring dayg no more sound of life 

 than sight of it in this monotonous region. Here and there 

 Pusilla's* little song, clear and lonely, was piped from the scrub- 

 oak, indicating how much more applicable here would be his 

 New England name of Bush Sparrow than our Field Sparrow 

 of the Middle States. Robins would be seen going over on any 

 day's walk or drive, and sometimes a Crow; several times 

 Flickers would loop across from some pine-stub, dead and 

 charred, to a distant neighbor; we would pass a few families of 



* Spizella pusilla. 



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