The Valley of the Tacony 



BY GEORGE SPENCER MORRIS 



In the minds of most ornithologists the bird and its environ- 

 ment are inseparably linked together. We pick up a dry and 

 dusty museum skin and instantly there springs before our men- 

 tal eye a vision of green meadow, breezy upland, tangled thicket 

 or dense forest as a setting for the living prototype of this dead 

 thing which we hold in our hands. Carrying the thought still 

 further, most of us have in mind some particular spot, with 

 which we instinctively associate a given species ; some actual 

 tree or grove or thicket where, perhaps in the distant days of 

 boyhood, we first came to know this bird, or where years of 

 acquaintance with it may have proved this or that spot to be its 

 favorite dwelling or resting place. Again every ornithologist 

 has made a more or less accurate geographic study of the region 

 about his home, and as a result has come to have some favorite 

 tramping ground, which he knows and loves with special inti- 

 macy in an ornithological as well as geographic sense. The care- 

 ful study of these quite restricted sections may often give just 

 as important scientific results as the mere listing of species seen 

 over much wider areas. There is a certain intimate charm in 

 such works as Gilbert White's " Natural History of Selborne" 

 which is in great measure dependent on the narrow limitations 

 of the region dealt with. 



For well nigh fifty years I have lived on the edge of the valley 

 through which winds the Tacony Creek, a stream flowing into 

 the Delaware in the northern section of the county of Philadel- 

 phia. Each year the city creeps closer to us. That red-brick 

 wave has almost reached to the opposite edge of our valley, j^-et 

 still the quiet stream comes down as of old between its wooded 

 hillsides, its marshy meadows, its over-hanging willows and its 

 alder thickets. For the study of bird-life this valley is almost 

 ideal, especially that stretch of some two miles which extends 



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