Jones — On Birds of Cedar Point. 187 



THE BIRDS OF CEDAR POINT AND VICINITY. 



by lynds jones. 



Land Birds. 



While the definite division of the birds into Water Birds and 

 Land Birds is, to my mind, a good deal artificial because some 

 so-called Land Birds live more in the vicinity of water than 

 some so-called Water Birds do, it never-the-less serves a suf- 

 ficientlv worthy purpose to be defensible. Certain it is that 

 Land Birds furnish us with more reliable data for working out 

 most migratiiMi problems because the influence of lar.g'e bodies 

 of water upon their movements is greater. Also, they averag'e 

 much more approachable and are found near our homes and 

 our work. It is, therefore, with less of efifort that they are 

 studied. 



The physical features of the islands have been treated with 

 sufficient fullness. It may not be out of place to remind the 

 reader that Pelee Island, like Point Pelee, has a considerable 

 growth of red cedar trees bordering the southward extending 

 point, which form rather dense thickets, especially along the 

 eastern border of the point. On the mainland of the region 

 under consideration the only evergreen woods are cedar thick- 

 ets nearly a mile in extent east of the summer resort grounds 

 of the Cedar Point Company, and occasional cedar thickets 

 along the lower reaches of Vermillion River ; small and scat- 

 tered growths of pines and hemlocks also along the lower 

 reaches of the A^ermillion and Black Rivers, growths that were 

 clearly considerable areas of marketable timber when the coun- 

 try was first settled, and occasional thickets of red cedar on 

 the sandstone knolls in the northern part of the Oberlin and 

 Vermillion c[uadrangles. It is doubtful if these evergreen 

 areas have ever had any considerable influence upon the dis- 

 tribution of the birds. Undoubtedly the thinning of the woods 

 in general has exerted a far more potent influence upon distri- 

 bution in general, of the Land Birds, just as the occupation of 

 the swamps at the mouths of nearly all streams has exerted a 

 profound influence upon the distribution of the Water Birds. 



