DELAWAEE VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLtTB. 55 



sounds which were quite new to them. About this time clouds 

 began to gather and the night was black. The hotel is lighted 

 by electricity and though no bright lights are raised aloft, a 

 glare spread out from the halls and parlors and through many 

 of the windows in the upper stories. In order to ascertain the 

 direction in which the birds were flying and whether they were 

 all being attracted by the light, I walked a considerable distance 

 in both directions from the hotel at right angles to the apparent 

 line of flight and along the edge of the plateau, and found that 

 I could distinguish about as many chirps a quarter of a mile 

 away as I could at the hotel. Judging by the sound of the 

 chirps, they were passing over at the rate of at least fifty per 

 minute and very continuously. 



About half past nine I was driven under cover by a shower 

 of rain which soon had the effect of bewildering the birds, and 

 they began to fly onto the porches and into the windows of the 

 hotel. First came an Oven-bird, then a Maryland Yellow- 

 throat and various other species, several of them wounding 

 themselves on the forehead by dashing against hard objects. 

 The greater number of the birds were seen, however, flying 

 around the outside of the building trying to gain a footing on 

 the sides of the house, or trailing up and down the halls in the 

 upper floors, alighting on transoms, or after a vain attempt to 

 find a resting-place at the corner of the ceiling, they would slide 

 down the plaster wall and get caught behind trunks and cur- 

 tains where thej' would flutter helplessly until released. 



The house was full of guests, many of whom were retiring for 

 the night, and they were startled by the entrance of what they 

 at first thought were bats, but discovering the nature of the cap- 

 tives they hastened to liberate them. Several were brought to 

 me for identification but there were numbers that were set free 

 before I saw them. The birds, so far as I could judge by the 

 plumage, were young of the year except one adult male Cana- 

 dian Warbler. The number of individual birds that came into 

 the hotel was probably thirty or forty, of which I identified 

 nineteen as follows: Yellow-bellied Flycatcher 5, Oven-bird 8, 

 Chestnut-sided Warbler 2, Blackburn ian Warbler 1, Black- 

 throated Green Warbler 1, Maryland Yellow-throat 1, Canadian 

 Warbler 1. 



