species are found regularly during the breeding season in the valleys of the Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, and even the Connecticut Rivers, extending inland for a greater or less distance, but are unknown in the surrounding higher country. Thus, Carolina wrens, cardinals, turkey buzzards, and other no less characteristic Carolinian birds are abundant in the bottom lands along the Susquehanna in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but are scarcely ever found on the uplands above the wooded slopes of the river, though the conditions of food and shelter seem equally favorable.[1]
Much of the outside world enters a man's soul and becomes the ground of his joy through life. We all owe something to the region in which we dwell, unconsciously perhaps, but still something that is assimilated by the tissues of the inner life, and that goes to the making of what we really are. Those of us who dwell on the borderland of Dixie owe some fragmentary moments of inspiration, even of happiness, to the genial influence of its proximity. We think of ourselves as belonging with the North, but has not the South spun a few threads into the web of our lives? The cardinal whistles the same sweet tune as he does in "Old Virginia" the opossum and the persimmon savor of the South; even the turkey buzzard suggests the warmer clime. And then spring is always two weeks earlier just down the Delaware, and this is something; even if it is too far off to start the "spring feeling," it hints of fresh early strawberries and the first run of the shad.
- ↑ Witmer Stone. The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, p. 10.
