Vol XIVl DwiGHT, The Philadelphia Virco. 26 1 



1*97 J ^ 



seen an undoubted Philadelphia Vireo, and stimulated by the 

 recollection of what Mr. Brewster had written about the great 

 similarity between the song of this bird and that of the Red-eyed 

 Vireo, I shortly made the discovery that, like him, I had been 

 living right in the midst of Philadelphias, mistaking them for 

 Red-eyes. No better illustration of the danger of identifying birds 

 by their songs alone could be desired than our similar experiences,, 

 and it teaches an obvious lesson. I soon familiarized myself with 

 the new song and, guided largely by it, have found this rare and 

 wilderness-loving Vireo to be irregularly distributed as a summer 

 resident in small numbers over a large area of wild mountainous 

 country about Tadousac. 



The village is most picturesquely situated at the junction of the 

 Saguenay with the St. Lawrence River, being hemmed in by low 

 mountains of inconsiderable height, a thousand or fifteen hundred 

 feet, part of the great Laurentian chain which extends for many 

 miles along the north shore of the broad St. Lawrence. Preci- 

 pices of no mean height, gray with lichens and mosses, frown 

 darkly over the Saguenay, while the adjacent hills and mountains, 

 piled in great confusion, stand out as dull masses of bare granite 

 or are scantily clad with struggling bushes and dwarfed trees that 

 cling in the seams and crevices. In some of the valleys there are 

 small rushing brooks tumbling over the rocks shadowed by a 

 dense growth ; in others, filled with the soil brought thither by 

 the erosion of a former epoch, the brooks have sunk deep 

 channels or gulches, which also are oftentimes well wooded. 

 There are, too, terraces of sand, underlaid with clay banks, and 

 eastward from the village they jut boldly, in great bluffs, into the 

 St. Lawrence. In the rocky portions of the country no cultivation 

 is possible, but the terraces and the valleys afford here and there 

 a few fields where slim crops of hay and oats are raised. The 

 wilderness extends eastward, westward, and northward, a sparsely 

 wooded country of towering hills and rocks where there is little to 

 break the monotony save a great number of small lakes, clear 

 and cold, stretches of ' barrens,' and the single road which winds 

 through the valleys. 



The forest, even where worthy the name, is thinly scattered 

 over this inhospitable region and much of it has fallen before axe 



