58 
BULLETIN OF THE NUTTALL 
In all the early notices of the natural productions of New 
England, the Crane is mentioned among the few birds usually 
enumerated. Emmons gives the Whooping Crane {Grus america- 
nus) in his list of the birds of Massachusetts, but subsequent 
writers have generally believed without due authority, and of late 
it has been wholly lost sight of as a bird of the State. That 
some species of Crane, and in all probability both species, was 
common in New England in early times, is beyond question. Both 
the Sandhill and the Whooping Cranes have still a wide range in 
the interior, passing northward in summer far beyond New Eng- 
land. Neither species has of late been met with north of New 
Jersey, where the Whooping Crane occurs only as a rare casual 
visitor. Morton wrote, of “Cranes, there are greate store, that ever 
more came there at S. Davids day, and not before ; that day they 
never would misse. These doe sometimes eate our come, and do 
pay for their presumption well enough ; and serveth there in pow- 
ther, with turnips to supply the place of powthered beefe, and is 
a goodly bird in a dish, and no discommodity.”* This shows that 
the Crane, and not a Heron, is the bird to which reference is made. 
The Swan ( Cygnus americamts) is in a similar way enumerated 
by different early writers as formerly a common bird of Massachu- 
setts, though of late years it appears only in our lists of casual 
visitors. Morton, more explicit than most writers of his time who 
refer to it, says, in beginning his account of the birds : “ And first 
the Swanne, because shee is the biggest of all the fowles of that 
Country. There are of them in Merrimack River, and in other 
parts of the country, greate store at the seasons of the yeare. The 
flesh is not much desired of by the inhabitants, but the skinnes 
may be accompted a commodity, fitt for divers uses, both for 
fethers, and quiles.”t 
The Great Auk (Alca impennis) has recently been added to the 
list of the birds of the State, on account of the occurrence of its 
bones in the Indian shell-heaps at Ipswich. There is little reason 
to doubt, however, that the bird called “ Pengwin,” or “ Penguin,” 
mentioned as found from Cape Cod northward at the time Euro- 
peans first visited this coast, really refers to the Great Auk. It 
figures in all the early enumerations of the birds of New England 
* New English Canaan, p. 69. 
+ Ib., p. 67. 
