224 Trotter, Land-Bird Fauna of N. E. America. [July 



Sparrow, the Purple Finch, the Barn, Cliff, and Tree Swallows, 

 the Nighthawk, Flicker, and others, but such wide-ranging forms 

 as the Bluebird, the Vesper Sparrow, the Chipping Sparrow, the 

 Goldfinch, and the Meadowlark were never observed during the 

 six summers spent in this region, while the Kingbird only appeared 

 at the latter end of the summer, about the last of August or early in 

 September, though breeding in more or less abundance in districts 

 farther to the north and west, and the Bobolink, which was quite 

 common in the dike lands about Canning and the Basin of Minas, 

 was only occasional in this southern Barrington district. 



The past summer, 1908, I spent at Chester, Nova Scotia, a small 

 village at the head of Mahone Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic, fifty 

 miles south of Halifax and about one hundred and fifty miles north 

 along the coast from Barrington. The region was in every way 

 similar to that about Barrington, but here at Chester I found the 

 Chipping Sparrow and the Goldfinch relatively abundant, yet at 

 no time was either of these birds ever seen at Barrington, though 

 habitat conditions there were equally favorable for both. How 

 far southward these species extend beyond Chester I am unable to 

 say, but the fact remains that they do not appear in the fauna of 

 the lower part of the peninsula, at least so far as my six summers of 

 observation and collecting about the Barrington region are con- 

 cerned. 



The solution of this rather curious local distribution of two such 

 widely spread species as the Chipping Sparrow and the Goldfinch 

 appears to me to be involved in a geological change, and to date 

 back to a time when Nova Scotia was severed from the mainland, 

 where what is now a low-lying and partly marshy tract of country 

 which forms the present neck or isthmus that separates the waters 

 of Northumberland Strait on the north from those of Chignecto 

 Bay, at the head of the Bay of Fundy, on the south. This region, 

 which we may call the Amherst district, from the principal town 

 situated there, is evidently an uplift of comparatively recent geolog- 

 ical date. Nova Scotia was unquestionably at one time an island, 

 severed from the rest of the continent by a strait, probably of some 

 width, which connected the two bodies of water mentioned above. 

 How wide a stretch of water this strait may have embraced it is 

 difficult to say. Prince Edward Island is now separated from the 



