PELICANS, CORMORANTS, AND PETRELS. 253 



Floridian peninsula. We have a few gulls even at 

 our city wharves, but nothing more. This was not 

 always the case. The records of innumerable feasts 

 and countless camp-fires of the Indians remain in the 

 mounds of shells, bones, and ashes that we find along 

 the coast, and in the ash-pits and fire-sites in our 

 river valleys. These tell of great birds in abundance ; 

 but from June to October, 1893, anywhere from Maine 

 to Mary land, were pelicans or cormorants really abun- 

 dant, or even seen at all ? Petrels we have, because 

 they are yet beyond man's fiendish ingenuity to de- 

 stroy, but not so of the large, sluggish sea-side and 

 river-side dwellers. How utterly absurd it would 

 have sounded in men's ears a century ago to have 

 spoken of the possibility of exhausting the stock of 

 food-fishes in the sea ! Yet this is a subject that has 

 received serious attention from legislative bodies. 



There is marked on an old map of New Jersey a 

 stream flowing into the Delaware River that in the 

 Indian tongue was known as Mechen-tsiholens sippu, 

 or Big-bird Creek, and a bone of a pelican found in 

 an ash-pit on the bank of that stream has always led 

 me to think that this was the bird to which they 

 referred, although not far away from the old Indian 

 village was a spot in the river " that never freezes, and 

 where swans do congregate." When, I wonder, was 

 the last pelican seen on the Delaware, more than one 

 hundred miles from its mouth ? Dr. Turnbull says 

 it " has been seen at rare intervals on the Delaware, 

 and on the sea-coast near Cape May." Ridgway 

 reports it " rare along the Atlantic coast of the United 

 States." Dr. Warren states it to be very rare in Penn- 



