Bird Migration in Pennsylvania a Hundred 

 Years Ago 



BY WELLS W. COOKE 



MoDEKN theories in regard to bird migration agree that present 

 migration routes are but the present stage in development of 

 routes that have been evolved from other original routes widely 

 different. How fast changes have taken place there is no means 

 of knowing, but the present inquiry is an endeavor to learn 

 whether any perceptible changes have occurred in the past hun- 

 dred years. The history of bird migration in the United States 

 dates from the appearance in 1799 of Barton's "Fragments of 

 the Natural History of Pennsylvania", which contains his mi- 

 gration records for the year 1791 at Philadelphia. Something 

 about the bird life on this continent had been appearing in print 

 for many years previously, beginning with Hernandez, who 

 published in 1628 the first local bird list for this hemisphere, 

 being a list of the birds of Mexico, and containing 229 out of 

 the actual 1500 in that country. The first local list of Canada 

 was issued by Baron de la Hon tan in 1703, and six years later 

 Lawson published his list of the birds of Carolina, the first local 

 list of the United States. Nearly a hundred years elapsed after 

 that before any one considered it worth while to record in print 

 the dates of the arrival of the birds. 



Dr. Benjamin S. Barton was "Professor of Materia Medica, 

 Natural History and Botany in the University of Pennsylvania", 

 as the title-page of his ' ' Fragments ' ' announces, and he wrote 

 this tract of 42 pages as "Part First" of a series of treatises 

 which he hoped to issue, and two others, which he says he 

 had already in preparation. As they were never published it 

 seems probable that the first part was not a sufficient financial 

 success. 



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