PELICANS, CORMORANTS, AND PETRELS. 253 
Floridian peninsula. We have a few gulls even at 
our city wharves, but nothing more. This was not 
always the case. The records of innumerable feasts 
and countless camp-fires of the Indians remain in the 
mounds of shells, bones, and ashes that we find along 
the coast, and in the ash-pits and fire-sites in our 
river valleys. These tell of great birds in abundance ; 
but from June to October, 1893, anywhere from Maine 
to Maryland, were pelicans or cormorants really abun- 
dant, or even seen at all? Petrels we have, because 
they are yet beyond man’s fiendish ingenuity to de- 
stroy, but not so of the large, sluggish sea-side and 
river-side dwellers. How utterly absurd it would 
have sounded in men’s ears a century ago to have 
spoken of the possibility of exhausting the stock of 
food-fishes in the sea! Yet this is a subject that has 
received serious attention from legislative bodies. 
There is marked on an old map of New Jersey a 
stream flowing into the Delaware River that in the 
Indian tongue was known as Mechen-tsiholens sippu, 
or Big-bird Creek, and a bone of a pelican found in 
an ash-pit on the bank of that stream has always led 
me to think that this was the bird to which they 
referred, although not far away from the old Indian 
village was a spot in the river “ that never freezes, and 
where swans do congregate.” When, I wonder, was 
the last pelican seen on the Delaware, more than one 
hundred miles from its mouth? Dr. Turnbull says 
it “has been seen at rare intervals on the Delaware, 
and on the sea-coast near Cape May.’ Ridgway 
reports it “rare along the Atlantic coast of the United 
States.” Dr. Warren states it to be very rare in Penn- 
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