The Snow Hill Bird-Roost 



BY SAMUEL N. RHOADS. 



Snow Hill is an old negro settlement, probably entitled long 

 ago to its centennial anniversary, and located a mile or more 

 south of Haddonfield, Camden Co., N. J, Approached from 

 the Haddonfield side, it has a sandy, hilly appearance, but on 

 other sides that feature is not manifest. On the northeast side 

 of the hamlet it slopes rapidly toward the spring-heads of a 

 branch of Cooper's Creek, and at this point is located what I 

 have decided to call a Bird-roost, as distinguished from a Black- 

 bird, or Robin-roost. 



It may seem as strange to you as it has to me that with all 

 my gadding about for forty years after birds, not only around 

 home, but abroad as well, I had as yet never discovered a 

 Blackbird or a Robin-roost. Imagine therefore my feelings on 

 August 31, 1913, when after a few hours scouting, I found my- 

 self in a roost of that kind within rifle shot of my old home. 

 Nor was this all, a negro, whose house stood close by the roost, 

 said that this piece of woods had always been a fall resort for 

 thousands of birds, and a white farmer on the other side said 

 that he had known them to frequent the place for roosting dur- 

 ing the fourteen years he had lived there. 



This roosting place does not strike one as ideal. It is small ; 

 the wooded portion of a hillside covering only about four or 

 five acres. The higher portion is a sandy knoll covered with 

 bushy pines twelve to eighteen feet high; below these, oaks, 

 gums and chestnuts, of twenty to thirty-five feet, thickly cover 

 the slope, and at the bottom, which is swampy, oaks, red 

 maples and black gums, some forty to fifty feet high, reach out 

 to the cleared meadow and brush lands of the true swamp. The 

 roost is thus isolated from other pieces of woods in the vicinity 

 by cleared or partially cleared areas on all sides. This fact may 



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