Show a botanist a landscape, and he
will tell you where to look for the lady's-slipper, the columbine, or
the harebell. On the same principles the ornithologist will direct you
where to look for the greenlets, the wood sparrow, or the chewink. In
adjoining counties, in the same latitude, and equally inland, but
possessing a different geological formation and different
forest-timber, you will observe quite a different class of birds. In a
land of the beech and sugar maple I do not find the same songsters
that I know where thrive the oak, chestnut, and laurel. In going from
a district of the Old Red Sandstone to where I walk upon the old
Plutonic Rock, not fifty miles distant, I miss in the woods, the
veery, the hermit thrush, the chestnut-sided warbler, the blue-backed
warbler, the green-backed warbler, the black and yellow warbler, and
many others, and find in their stead the wood thrush, the chewink, the
redstart, the yellow-throat, the yellow-breasted flycatcher, the
white-eyed flycatcher, the quail, and the turtle dove.
In my neighborhood here in the Highlands the distribution is very
marked. South of the village I invariably find one species of birds,
north of it another.
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