smaller and some larger than the same species in England, haunted the marshes.[1] No reference was made by the early adventurers to the presence of the reed-bird and the sora, but doubtless both were just as abundant in aboriginal Virginia in the autumn as they are in the State at the same season to-day.[2] When the voyagers of 1607 arrived in the Chesapeake, the flocks of geese, swans, and ducks had retired to their breeding grounds in the North. The first birds apparently to make more than a passing impression upon the Englishmen, were the blackbird and the turkey, which they saw in great numbers as they sailed up the Powhatan. They observed that the blackbird had a brilliant tuft of red feathers on each shoulder;[3] this species is still very common in the reedy marshes of the James, and among the willows that grow upon its banks. The turkey long ago retired to distant forests, but was so often seen in the course of the first explorations of the Powhatan that its name was given to an island in the river, a name which it still bears.[4] On this island, a great store of turkey eggs were found, an indication of the wildness and loneliness of its surroundings, for the turkey has always sought the most secluded spots for the preparation of its nest. Flocks of forty were frequently observed by the settlers at Jamestown.[5] Evelyn goes so far as to say, that in the country adjacent to the upper sections of the Chesapeake, flocks of four and five hundred were not unusual,[6] and this does not seem to be wholly improbable when it is remembered that every
- ↑ Clayton's Virginia, p. 33, Force's Historical Tracts, vol. III.
- ↑ The first reference to the sora which I have observed is in a letter of John Clayton, 1739, printed in Richmond (Va.) Dispatch, Sept. 8, 1889.
- ↑ Percy's Discourse, p. lxvi.
- ↑ Ibid., p. xlii.
- ↑ Strachey's Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 125.
- ↑ New Albion, p. 27, Force's Historical Tracts, vol. II.
