Vol. XXXVIII 



1020 



Grinnell, Audubon Park. 375 



Grandma Audubon gave me my first conscious lesson about 

 birds. I cannot remember a time when the common names of the 

 more familiar species were not known to me, though I presume 

 the list was not a long one. It included, however, the passenger 

 pigeon, which was seen in the dogwood trees each autumn, and 

 the white-headed eagle, which in winter was extremely abundant 

 on the floating ice of the river and sometimes brought its captive 

 fish to the trees in the park, there to eat them or as often to quarrel 

 about them with its fellows, and sometimes to drop the prey. 



One of my early recollections is of being called from the break- 

 fast table one morning to look at a large flock of Passenger Pigeons 

 that was feeding in a dogwood tree twenty-five or thirty feet from 

 the house. There were so many of the birds that all could not 

 alight in it, and many kept fluttering about while others fed on 

 the ground, eating the berries knocked off by those above. 



Thirty years ago an account was printed in ' The Auk' by Mr. 

 Geo. N. Lawrence of birds at Manhattan ville before 1850. Audu- 

 bon Park was only a mile above Manhattanville, and fifteen or 

 twenty years later than the time written of by Mr. Lawrence, 

 conditions there had not changed. The region was still untouched 

 country. The City of New York had not begun its northward 

 march. On Sixth Avenue the pavements stopped at 23rd Street, 

 and on Broadway the dirt road began at 36th Street. 



It was Grandma Audubon who, when I was a little fellow, 

 identified for me a bird that I had never seen before. One morn- 

 ing in late winter, or early spring, on my way to school I had al- 

 most reached the Victor Audubon house, when I saw a dozen 

 or twenty small greenish birds feeding on the grass under a pine 

 tree. I approached them slowly, trying to see what they were; 

 and they did not fly, even when I was within a few feet of them. 

 I did not know them, and they were so tame that I resolved to 

 try to catch one. The crabnet used in summer always hung in 

 the area under the Victor Audubon piazza, and backing away 

 from the birds I ran there, secured the net, and returned. It 

 was not difficult for a cautious lad to get near enough to the little 

 birds to pass the net over one, and when I had caught it I rushed 

 into the house and up to Grandma's room, and showed her my 

 prize. She told me that the bird was a Red Crossbill — a young 



