Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/421

Rh colubris, and the Blue Yellow-backed Warbler, Parula americana, can find their way across six hundred miles of water in safety, where is the line to be drawn?

With the exception of a solitary example of the European Sky Lark, Alauda arvensis, obtained in 1850, the whole of the birds recorded in the Bermuda list are included in that of North America, and no species has as yet been discovered peculiar to the islands. This, if we accept the theory of the comparatively recent "Æolian" formation of the group, is not to be wondered at. At one time I actually had great hopes of establishing a real 'Mudian species, as I several times observed a small brown bird, remarkably shy and mouse-like in its habits, among the dense rushes and scrub of the larger swamps, and this I could not refer to any known North American form, I had a good view of one, too, close to me, one Sunday afternoon (of course it was on a Sunday, when I had no gun with me), and carefully took stock of the little fellow; but, as I never succeeded in procuring a specimen, I must perforce leave the question undecided, in the hope that someone may be more fortunate in this respect than myself.

Rejecting doubtful occurrences, one hundred and eighty-one species are known to have occurred in the Bermudas up to June 3rd, 1875. Since then two more species, Certhia familiaris and Limosa hudsonica, have been added. During the fourteen months I resided there, no less than seventy -nine species were recorded, sixty-eight of these by myself personally. I was only able, however, to obtain specimens of sixty-one of these, but that, of course, far exceeded my original expectations. The winter of 1874–75 was not exactly a favourable one for a collector, few violent storms occurring at critical times to drive the birds to the strange and unexpected shelter in mid-ocean. I worked hard,—as hard, that is to say, as my multifarious duties as an engineer officer would permit,—but many things were against me. In the first place, the peculiar elongated shape of the group of islands, and the long distances between the various swamps and "likely" places, to say nothing of the indifferent character of the roads, render it no easy task to "register" even a particular district in the course of an afternoon. The climate, too, except when the wind is from the north in winter lime, is warm and damp, and much against a long struggle through the sage bush and scrubby cedars which clothe the hills, or over the rough steel-pointed rocks of the shore.