BIRD MIGRATION. 33 



of coast line, but two lighthouses, Fowey Rocks and Sombrero Key, 

 cause far more bird tragedies than any others. The reason is two- 

 fold — their geographic position and the character of their lights. 

 Both lights are situated at the southern end of Florida, where count- 

 less thousands of birds pass each year to and from Cuba; and both 

 are lights of the first magnitude on towers 100-140 feet high. Fowey 

 Rocks has a fixed white light, the deadliest of all. A flashing light 

 frightens birds away and a red light is avoided by them as would be a, 

 danger signal, but a steady white light looming out of the mist or 

 darkness seems like a magnet drawing the wanderers to destruction. 

 Coming from any direction they veer around to the leeward side and 

 then flying against the wind strike the glass, or more often exhaust 

 themselves like moths fluttering in and out of the bewildering rays. 



ARE BIRDS EXHAUSTED BY LONG FLIGHT? 



During the spring migration of 1903 two experienced ornithologists 

 spent the entire season on the coast of northwestern Florida, visiting 

 every sort of bird haunt. They were eminently successful in the long 

 list of species identified, but their enumeration is still more remarkable 

 for what it does not contain. About 25 species of the smaller land 

 birds of the Eastern States were not seen, including a dozen common 

 species. Among these latter were the chat, the redstart, and the 

 indigo bunting, three species abundant throughout the whole region 

 to the northward. The explanation of their absence from the list 

 seems to be that these birds, on crossing the Gulf of Mexico, flew far 

 inland before alighting and thus passed over the observers. This 

 would seem to disprove the popular belief that birds under ordinary 

 circumstances find the ocean flight excessively wearisome, and that 

 after laboring with tired pinions across the seemingly endless wastes 

 they sink exhausted on reaching terra firma. The truth seems to be 

 that, endowed by nature with wonderful powers of aerial locomotion, 

 many birds under normal conditions not only cross the Gulf of 

 Mexico at its widest point but even pass without pause over the 

 low swampy coastal plain to the higher territory beyond. 



So little averse are birds to an ocean flight that many fly from 

 eastern Texas to the Gulf coast of southern Mexico (see fig. 2, 

 route 5), though this 400 miles of water journey hardly shortens the 

 distance of travel by an hour's flight. Thus birds avoid the hot, 

 treeless plains and scant provender of southern Texas by a direct 

 flight from the moist, insect-teeming forests of northern Texas to a 

 similar country in southern Mexico. 



That birds are not exhausted by their long flights will be evident 

 upon consideration of the origin of these protracted journeys. All 

 migratory movements must have begun with changes of location 



