. Common birds of town and country . n toward their Brazilian win-ter abode; but the South Carolina andGeorgia birds take a course almost atright angles to that chosen by the scarlettanagers from those States, and strikeout directlv across the West Indies forSouth America. In this part of theirjourney their migration path contracts toan east-and-west breadth of about 800miles, while a very large proportion ofthe birds restrict themselves to the east-ern 400 miles of this route. In SouthAmerica, the region occupied during thewinter .has about one-fifth the breadthand one-third the area of the b
. Common birds of town and country . n toward their Brazilian win-ter abode; but the South Carolina andGeorgia birds take a course almost atright angles to that chosen by the scarlettanagers from those States, and strikeout directlv across the West Indies forSouth America. In this part of theirjourney their migration path contracts toan east-and-west breadth of about 800miles, while a very large proportion ofthe birds restrict themselves to the east-ern 400 miles of this route. In SouthAmerica, the region occupied during thewinter .has about one-fifth the breadthand one-third the area of the breedingrange. The,bobolinks of New England havewitnessed great numerical changes, orevolutions. When the white man arrivedon the scene, nearly all of New Englandwas coyered by primeval forest and bob-olink meadows were scarce. As the for-est gave place to hay-fields, the bobolinkspromptly took advantage of their chanceand their numbers increased steadily untilthe maximum was reached some 40 years 565 THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE. THE MIGRATION ROUTE OF THE BOBOLINK IS CHANGING (SEE PAGE 364) ago. Then the newly invented mowingmachine and the horsepower hay-rakebegan to destroy thousands of nests andcaused a marked diminution in the bobo-link census. The case of the bobolink is a fittingclose to this article, because it is reveal-ing to US at the present time the mannerof evolution of a new migration nature a lover of damp meadows, itwas formerly cut off from the western United States by the intervening aridregion. But with the advent of irriga-tion and the bringing of large areasunder cultivation, little colonies of nest-ing bobolinks are beginning to appearhere and there almost to the of them are shown by dots on theaccompanying map, and the probabilityis that the not distant future will seea large increase in these trans-RockyMountain bobolinks.
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