14 The Ornithology of Chester County 
purpose the boy was engaged in filling his sack in 
the school orchard, “out of bounds,” when “Jack” 
Townsend, his shirt bosom distended with apples; 
crossed his path under the low branches of an apple 
tree, and as he was about to direct the new boy 
where the best fruit lay, he espied the broad-brim- 
med hat of the teacher approaching along the hedge. 
He writes of Townsend: Active in mind, ardent in 
temperament, full of life and indefatigable in the 
pursuit of an idea that once possessed his mind. I 
have known him to watch for days a pair of birds 
constructing their nest, and far more interested in 
the operation than in the irksome study of an in- 
doors lesson, although fully up to any one in his 
class. It was at this early age that the incipient 
ornithologist appeared. 
Under the stimulus of some great works on Amer- 
ican ornithology, some of our brightest students at- 
tempted the study of the local birds and if the 
second quarter of the nineteenth century failed of 
being the golden period of ornithology in Chester 
county, it was due to Quaker modesty. 
John K., and his cousin, William P. Townsend,’ 
and perhaps one or twe others, of West Chester; 
were the first to form a nearly complete collection 
of local birds in the county, and the former while 
collecting for Dr. Ezra Michener at New Garden 
in 1833, took the unique Townsend’s Bunting. In 
1826, the Chester County Cabinet of Science was 
established in West Chester, and when the organi- 
zation moved into their own building erected in 
1836, it was entered in the minutes that “the 
