A Bird’s-Eye View 
These vast colonies are described as flying 
about their island homes ‘‘in great files and 
platoons, at regular hours in the morning and 
evening, making a dark girdle of birds more 
than a quarter of a mile broad, and thirty miles 
long, whirling round and round the island, and 
forcing upon the most casual observer a last- 
ing impression.’’ 
Ps 
Simultaneously with the arrival of thrush, 
finch, and warbler in swamp and upland, occurs 
the equally interesting passage of the host of 
water birds along the coast of New Jersey, 
north and south shores of Long Island, the 
water-front of New England, with the numer- 
ous adjoining islands. Sometimes at the ocean’s 
edge, but oftener in the protected inlets, where 
water is quieter, and food more abundant, one 
may find, in spring and fall, representatives of 
all the groups hereafter described, an assort- 
ment far more diversified in their distinctive 
types than can be found among land birds. 
As a rapid review of this regular recurring 
panorama, and as an aid in remembering the 
more conspicuous differences of the various 
groups of water fowl, I purpose to give a bird’s- 
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