6750 



Birds. 



immediate neighbourhood of a town is not the most desirable locality 

 for carrying on one's observations on any but the swallow tribe and a 

 few others. Most of the birds seen or collected were found within a 

 very narrow range, and within two miles of the town ; and I intend, 

 for the benefit of any ornithologist who may chance to stray 

 to that part of the country, to point out the exact position of the 

 secluded and sheltered glen in which the greater part of my speci- 

 mens were collected. 



Quitting the town of Kingston by the upper Portsmouth road, 

 leaving the Cathedral on the right and the splendid new Court-house 

 on the left, you proceed for nearly a mile on the usual raised boarded 

 foot-way, through level, half-cultivated fields almost without a tree or 

 even a stump ; then, leaving the high road, and striking off obliquely 

 to the right for half a mile or more over a barren-looking common, 

 dotted here and there with clumps of the everlasting fir, the first 

 wood or enclosure is reached (where a few birds only are likely to be 

 met with, there being neither underwood nor water), but not quite so 

 smoothly as on paper, there being endless snake-fences to be clam- 

 bered over, no easy matter when encumbered by shot and gun, to say 

 nothing of heavy boots (rendered imperatively necessary by the 

 swampy and spongy nature of the soil in Canada, which would puzzle 

 the ingenuity of the most skilful agriculturist to drain, the country 

 being generally a dead level) ; and ornithologists afflicted with obe- 

 sity, if such excitable beings ever are so, should pause ere they trust 

 themselves astride on the topmost bars of suspicious-looking snake- 

 fences, as they are in these old enclosures very apt to give way, when 

 great is the fall thereof. {1 have in my mind's eye a vivid recollec- 

 tion of a scene of the sort, but the sufferer, fortunately, was of the 

 leaner kind, or the fall of some five or six feet, gun in hand, might 

 have knocked out his own brains as well as those of the much-prized 

 specimen he held. But supposing these intolerable zigzag bar- 

 ricades to be surmounted, passing a "clearance" or two, i. <?., fields 

 literally covered with charred stumps, the glade is approached, its 

 sloping banks margined with a profusion of scrubby underwood 

 and stunted hawthorn-bushes. In the back- ground trees of various 

 kinds are seen, though, the soil being shallow and rocky, they 

 are somewhat dwarfish in growth ; but their spreading branches and 

 thick foliage serve to shelter and protect the various kinds of birds 

 now daily arriving from the South, and which seemingly make this 

 their resting place before dispersing to their breeding stations or 

 spreading themselves over the country. At the head of the vale is a 



