JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 105 
year’s haunts. The instinct to move north must have been an 
extremely powerful one in the breasts of the feathered hosts, 
for in these districts the dissolving of the wintry accumula- 
tions of ice and snow had only made a feeble beginning, yet 
for a hundred miles or more to the east, west and south of us 
observers reported the arrival of the feathered heralds of spring 
at nearly the same hour. ‘‘Onward, onward,’’ seemed the de- 
termined purpose and vocal burden. Lake Erie must have been 
crossed on the swell of the warm atmospheric wave during the 
night of the 17th, as the thawing temperature only set in here 
just before noon on the 17th (March) and an observer at or 
near Delhi in Norfolk county assures us that the song of the 
blithe blue birds were the gladsome greetings at sunrise, 18th 
of March, which was simultaneous with the like phenomena 
in Burford, and also within a many mile radius of where we 
now write. The screams of large hawks circling in mid-air were 
obvious on the 26th of March, and on that same day the first 
faint piping of the hyla (swamp frog) was heard by several 
local observers. Although the larks are usually considered 
insectivorous birds, the appellation cannot be strictly applicable 
and the fact of the North American large species being able to 
exist in a number of instances through the severities of a Can- 
adian winter is a sufficient evidence that a variety of grass and 
other seeds form during the frigid months the main food supply 
and it well established that the seeds of the very widely distri- 
buted dandelion plant are even in summer time eaten with 
avidity by the lark class of birds. The seeds of poa pratensis, 
panicum crus galli and setaria glauca are abundant in the litter | 
of stock stack vards where these hardy birds pass the winter 
season; the prairie or shore larks also frequent the cattle runs 
during the winter, and the debris to be found in such places 
forms food supply of crows, grackles, jays until the warmer 
season arrives to bring into activity the insect tribes. There 
have been scarcely any displays of the aurora borealis observed 
here during the past winter, only one illumination from that 
source was spoken of during the month of January, and that 
only of a few hours duration, but the northern aurora may yet 
14 
