1886.] Crow Roosts and Roosting Crows. 779 
What bird more justly merits the blessing of long life, if we 
reward him according to his way of honoring father and mother 
by cleaving to the unaccountable eccentricities which seem so 
out of the common order of corvine habits and customs ? 
In this respect the Pea Patch and Reedy island roosts are 
parallel instances. 
Though my personal experience is confined to the roosts of 
New Jersey, outside information supports the conclusion that 
more crows pass the winter nights in that State than in all the 
rest of the Union taken together, and a few months careful ex- 
amination has ‘shown that in the counties of Camden and Bur- 
lington nearly every tract, ten miles square, contains one of their 
dormitories ; also, that in the western half of Burlington county, 
which would include four such tracts, there are at least seven 
localities known to the writer as being the resort of from one to 
three hundred thousand crows nightly. 
A more thorough canvass of the subject would undoubtedly 
reveal three or four more such places yet unheard of with accu- 
racy sufficient to justify a present enumeration in the roosts of 
Burlington county. A list of those roosts which have come un- 
der notice will be given at the end of this paper. Roosting places, 
in proportion to their immunity from invasion, are used year 
after year, and probably before the settlement of our middle dis- 
tricts many of them were centuries old. That one in Maryland 
of which Godman speaks as being so ancient that the droppings 
had accumulated to the depth of several feet, and the fermenta- 
tion of which he supposed sufficient to contribute to the warmth 
of the roost, is unparalleled by the crow dormitories of to-day. 
It seems hardly credible that such a store of guano should have 
long existed among Southern agriculturists, nor can we believe 
that the native pines of Maryland, indigenous to a thin, infertile 
Soil, could have borne such high-grade fertilizing. For the sake 
of consistency we may cut down “feet” to inches in order to 
Save the trees, nor do we think it either possible or necessary 
that a crow warm his bed-chamber in such a manner as our 
Worthy author suggests. 
So universal has been the persecution of these birds at night, 
We will not be able to find among the many roosts now in use 
More than half of them of ten years’ standing. This necessity for 
quitting old-established resorts has taught the wary birds a les- 
