DELAWARE VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 33 



side. There was distant thunder and now and then a few drops 

 of rain. So threatening was it that I was glad to reach the 

 deserted clapboard houses that still stand in the old meadow a 

 quarter of a mile below Pocono Heights. I went into the first 

 of them and waited for the storm to break. For a while the run- 

 ning over the news of the early eighties in the old papers that 

 were pasted over the inner walls of the house contented me, 

 but soon, as the drops fell no faster, I went on up stream, no 

 doubt much to the relief of the old ground-hog whose retreat to 

 his shaft up the fireplace I cut off by my presence. I had not 

 seen a bird all the way up the stream and I saw not one here, 

 not even one of the Pewees that earlier each year nest under the 

 stairs of the old house. 



Once past the Pocono Heights house, however, birds were 

 plenty. A stiff breeze was sweeping across these uplands, wet 

 from rain not far away; thunder was rumbling on all sides, 

 there was that expectancy before a storm that is as rousing to 

 birds as to man. A flock of Barn Swallows were gathered on 

 fence and wires opposite the great gray barn, the largest in all 

 this region, — gathered in bunches, and noisy as though about 

 to migrate. In the great fields, now all shorn of their crops, 

 which this great barn is far too large to house, Meadowlarks 

 called from all directions, and some of them clattered down 

 across the road just before me. Kingbirds lifted up their voices 

 loudly from the wires and Bluebirds gurgled gently; Field 

 Sparrows and Vesper Sparrows sang as though it were evening 

 twilight in early summer; and the Swallows dipped and swerved 

 about, as gratulous on the wing as when they regained the 

 wires. Crows cawed from a distance, and Robins threw them- 

 selves high in the air from the fence-posts. 



I entered the barrens again after traversing about a half mile 

 of open country, and in ten minutes more I was again in the 

 burnt district, this time on the other side from Buck Hill Falls. 

 A Song Sparrow was singing here in a low place now white 

 with ashes, I suppose, of the sphagnum of what was once a 

 swamp. Pewees were about in the burnt brush as on the day 

 before, and Field Sparrows and Chewinks were even more 

 numerous. Once down the top of the ridge, however, on an- 



