BIRDS OF NORTHER'N" VENEZUELA — WETMORE 179 



pipers, greater and lesser yellowlegs, and western sandpipers fed 

 about the lagoon, bobolinks called to me from the rushes, barn 

 swallows circled about the kiosk (built for G6mez) where I ate my 

 meals, and scores of blackpoU warblers fluttered through the trees 

 and bushes. In my collecting I scanned birds indistinctly seen with 

 field glasses to avoid shooting more of these migrant individuals 

 than my studies required. Here daily I had self-evident fact that 

 northern bu*ds did winter in the Tropics, and I was literally forced 

 to ponder on the irresistible urge that had carried them over the 

 vast intervening distance and the mysterious force that had guided 

 them to the shores of northern South America over routes that to 

 those individuals hatched that year at least were wholly unknown. 



There was brought home to me also more definitely than ever 

 before the tremendous loss of life that this journej- entaUs. The 

 wastage of modern human battlefields, though terrible beyond words, 

 is as nothing in comparison. Here on this open shore small, feathered 

 migrants often made a land fall in a state of evident exhaustion. 

 Blackpoll warblers that travel south through the Eastern United 

 States late in September with their bodies so cased in oily fat that 

 the skin is fairly distended reached the Venezuelan coast with this 

 reserve entirely exhausted and even the body muscles obviously thin 

 and wasted. Often in early morning I found little groups of them 

 feeding rather listlessly on the short herbage of the open flats where 

 they hopped slowly about in search of food. Others ranged through 

 weeds and bushes without caring at the moment to proceed farther 

 inland to the more secure shelter of the forests. 



Some obviously had barely made a land fall after an exhausting 

 sea journey, as in some of those that I handled the flight muscles 

 that move the wings were reduced to thin bands through which the 

 angular ridges of the breast bone projected. One yellow-billed 

 cuckoo found freshly dead in the bushes back of the beach in early 

 morning had evidently arrived too exhausted to survive, as little 

 remained of its once strong muscles except flaccid bands over its 

 bones. 



It was easy to visualize the hundreds and thousands that wan- 

 dered over the water until they fell to drown, and the hundreds of 

 others that arrived only to succumb to the strains imposed by the 

 exhausting journey. 



