EARLY ACCOUNTS OF THE BIRDS OF VIRGINIA. 



Although no systematic treatise upon the birds which are found 

 in Virginia is to be met with before Mark Catesby's important 

 woi"k, published in 1731, which did not relate exclusively to 

 the birds of the State, yet from the times of the settlement at 

 Jamestown in 1606 to the early part of the present century, we 

 find, in the works which have come down to us from the earlier 

 writers on Virginia, as well as from the travellers of later date, 

 constant allusions to the great abundance of game, and mention 

 made of many of the more conspicuous of our other birds. These 

 accounts, though usually brief and unscientific, and in many cases 

 fragmentary and incidental, are not devoid of interest, and thi'ow 

 considerable light upon the former abundance of several species. 



The most complete of the earliest accounts of the Virginia 

 birds given by the Jamestown colonists (not including the writings 

 of Thomas Hariot* a member of the earlier colony established 

 by Sir Richard Grenville on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 

 1585), is that of William Strachey,t 1610-12 which seems to 

 have been overlooked by ornithological writers, and reads as 

 follows : "• Likewise as they have fruicts and beasts, so have they 

 fowles and that great store. Of birdes, the eagle is the greatest 

 devourer and many of them there : there be divers sortes of 

 hawkes, sparhawkes, laneretts, goshawkes, falcons and ospreys ; 

 Turkeys there be great store, wild in the woods, like phesants in 

 England forty in a company as big as our tame here, and yt is 

 an excellent fowle and so passing good meat, as I maye well sale, 

 yt is the best of any kind of flesh which I have ever yet eaten 

 there. Partridges there are little bigger then our quailes ! I have 

 knowne of our men to have killed them with their small shott, 

 sometime from oft' a tree five or six at a shoot. Cranes, white 

 and grey ; herons, both grey and white ; woosells, or black 

 byrds, with redd shoulders ; thrushes, and divers sorts of small 

 byrdes, some carnation, some blew, and some other straunge 



*A Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, etc., Frankfort 

 on the Main, 1590. Reprinted, New York, 1871. 



fThe Historic of travaile into Virginia Brittannia by William Strachey, Gent. 

 London, printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1849. 



