OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN AND ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETIES 
One Year 25 Cents Single Copy 5 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society at Madison, Wisconsin 
Entereil as second class matter August 23, 1909, at Madison, Wis., under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879 
VOL/. XII. 
OCTOBER, 1910 
NO. 4 
BIRD MIGRATION 
By Edith G. Mugger, Hart, Michigan. 
The fall migration of birds for this 
locality is nearing- its close; and soon 
we will hear no more the voices of our 
feathered friends. For many weeks 
past they have been gathering in great 
flocks by the roadside, in the fields and 
orchards feasting on the weed seeds and 
insects, thus fortifying themselves for 
their long n’ght flights toward the South¬ 
land. For twenty years the Biological 
Survey has had ornithological experts 
stationed at various points from northern 
Alaska to southern South America study¬ 
ing the wonderful problem of bird mi¬ 
gration ; and, though much valuable 
data has been secured, there are still 
many curious phenomena for which no 
explanation has been found. In fact no 
one has been able to explain why birds 
migrate at all and certainly not why they 
travel such immense distances. It is 
clearly not a question of food for many 
species move on when their particular 
kind of food is most abundant. Some 
scientists claim that ages and ages ago 
the periodic changes in the food supply 
were such as to- drive the birds north or 
south to other feeding grounds and that 
the habit thus formed has been passed 
down from generation to generation. 
A large portion of the migrants 
choose the night for their traveling and 
cover most incredible distances between 
sunset and sunrise. The Warblers, some 
of the tiniest of our birds, fly from five 
to' seven hundred miles across the Gulf 
of Mexico' in a single night. 
Most of the travelers coming from the 
far north at this season follow the At¬ 
lantic coast to Florida. From there P 
would seem the sensible thing, to us 
humans, to go by easy stages to> Haiti, 
Porto Rico' and the Lesser Antilles to 
South America, but the birds are wiser 
than we and seem to know that the food 
supply on these small islands would be 
inadequate 1 to the needs of the hundreds 
of thousands of their kind that annually 
wing their way to the sunny southern 
clime. Therefore a few species only, 
save those that winter in Porto Rico, 
travel that way but take their flight in¬ 
stead to the beautiful Jamaica hills from 
whence they fly straight across the hun¬ 
dreds of miles of ocean waste to Central 
America. 
The Bob-o-link fresh from the Caro¬ 
lines, where he has been gorging himself 
in the rice fields, seems so surcharged 
with energy that great effort is a joy to 
him; and he often makes the 700 miles 
from Cuba to South America without a 
stop. 
Some of the shore birds take the most 
