Voi. xivn 
1897 J 
Dwight, The Philadelphia Vireo . 
261 
seen an undoubted Philadelphia Vireo, and stimulated by the 
recollection of what Mr. Brewster had written about the great 
similarity between the song of this bird and that of the Red-eyed 
Vireo, I shortly made the discovery that, like him, I had been 
living right in the midst of Philadelphias, mistaking them for 
Red-eyes. No better illustration of the danger of identifying birds 
by their songs alone could be desired than our similar experiences, 
and it teaches an obvious lesson. I soon familiarized myself with 
the new song and, guided largely by it, have found this rare and 
wilderness-loving Vireo to be irregularly distributed as a summer 
resident in small numbers over a large area of wild mountainous 
country about Tadousac. 
The village is most picturesquely situated at the junction of the 
Saguenay with the St. Lawrence River, being hemmed in by low 
mountains of inconsiderable height, a thousand or fifteen hundred 
feet, part of the great Laurentian chain which extends for many 
miles along the north shore of the broad St. Lawrence. Preci- 
pices of no mean height, gray with lichens and mosses, frown 
darkly over the Saguenay, while the adjacent hills and mountains, 
piled in great confusion, stand out as dull masses of bare granite 
or are scantily clad with struggling bushes and dwarfed trees that 
cling in the seams and crevices. In some of the valleys there are 
small rushing brooks tumbling over the rocks shadowed by a 
dense growth ; in others, filled with the soil brought thither by 
the erosion of a former epoch, the brooks have sunk deep 
channels or gulches, which also are oftentimes well wooded. 
There are, too, terraces of sand, underlaid with clay banks, and 
eastward from the village they jut boldly, in great bluffs, into the 
St. Lawrence. In the rocky portions of the country no cultivation 
is possible, but the terraces and the valleys afford here and there 
a few fields where slim crops of hay and oats are raised. The 
wilderness extends eastward, westward, and northward, a sparsely 
wooded country of towering hills and rocks where there is little to 
break the monotony save a great number of small lakes, clear 
and cold, stretches of ‘ barrens,’ and the single road which winds 
through the valleys. 
The forest, even where worthy the name, is thinly scattered 
over this inhospitable region and much of it has fallen before axe 
