A BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE 

 DEVOTED TO THE STUDY AND PROTECTION OF BIRDS 



Official Organ of the Audubon Societies 



Vol. V 



November — December, 1903 



No. 6 



An Island Eden 



BY FRANK M. CHAPMAN 



With photographs from nature by the author 



ORrON wrote of New England birds in 1632, of "cranes 

 there are a great store . . . they sometimes eate our corne 

 and doe pay for their presumption well enough ... a 

 goodly bird in a dishe and no discomodity." Of "swannes," 

 this early natural historian tells us, "there was a great store 

 at the seasons of the year." Other water-fowl there were in 

 countless myriads, and among them were Labrador Ducks, White Peli- 

 cans, and, not improbably, Great Auks. Trees fell beneath the weight of 

 roosting Wild Pigeons, which, in flight, darkened the air, and in proper 

 localities Heath Hens, the eastern Prairie Chicken, abounded. 



It was not a day when close attention was paid to natural science, and 

 we shall never definitely know the conditions of bird- and mammal-life 

 which existed at the time this country was colonized; but, from records 

 similar to those which Morton and others have left us, we gather that 

 surprising changes have occurred in the character of our bird -life during 

 the past four hundred years. Not only, as we know too well in our own 

 generation, have many species become greatly reduced in numbers, but 

 others have totally disappeared, or are seen only at long intervals as waifs 

 from some region in which they have not as yet become exterminated. 



The present-day ornithologist reads the time -discolored pages of these 

 pioneers with the keenest regret that the scenes they describe can never 

 be observed again. Imagine, then, the writer's exultation on discovering 

 that within one hundred miles of our most populous city there is still a 

 , considerable area where, if there is not a "greate store of Cranes," * the ex- 

 isting conditions are so unlike those commonly prevailing throughout the 

 surrounding region that the observer may easily fancy himself transported 

 to the early part of the last century. So marked is the change that he 



* Morton wrote of a true Crane of the genus Grus; not of our great Blue Heron [Ardea herodias), to which 

 the name ' Crane ' is often applied. 



