SOME TENNESSEE BIRD NOTES. 187 



meet with tree swallows, barn swallows, cliff 

 swallows, sand martins, and purple martins. 

 In other words, he need not go far to find 

 all the species of eastern North America, 

 with the single exception of the least attrac- 

 tive of the six ; that is to say, the rough- 

 wing. As compared with the people of 

 eastern Tennessee, then, we are still pretty 

 well favored. It is worth while to travel 

 now and then, if only to find ourselves better 

 off at home. 



It might be easy to suggest plausible 

 reasons for the general absence of swallows 

 from a country like that about Chattanooga ; 

 but the extraordinary scarcity of hawks, 

 while many persons — not ornithologists — 

 would account it less of a calamity, is more 

 of a puzzle. From Walden's Ridge I saw 

 a single sparrow hawk and a single red-tail ; 

 in addition to which I remember three birds 

 whose identity I could not determine. Five 

 hawks in the course of three weeks spent 

 entirely out of doors, in the neighborhood of 

 mountains covered with old forest ! Taken 

 by itself, this unexpected showing might 

 have been ascribed to some queer combina- 

 tion of accidents, or to a failure of observa- 



