great damage to the maize of the colonial farmers when the country had been brought under cultivation. It was these destructive habits which doubtless caused it to be regarded with equal aversion by the Indian tillers of the ground. The crows were to increase in number as the area of open land enlarged. The same was to be the case with the turkey-buzzards, which could not have found, in the vast body of forest covering the surface of Virginia three hundred years ago, the same abundance of carrion as to-day. There were several varieties of heron, the plumage of one variety being as exquisite in its whiteness as the plumage of the swan, while the legs were of a roseate color.[1] The bittern was also seen in Virginia but did not utter the peculiar booming cry of the bittern of the Old World. Clayton refers to the night raven or the Virginian bat, but leaves it in doubt whether he intended the bull bat or the whippoorwill, two birds resembling each other in appearance, but very different in their habits and notes.[2] It is highly probable that one of the principal sounds at night greeting the ears of the colonists as they languished in the fort at Jamestown in the summer of 1607, was the call of the
- ↑ When the expedition of Captains Amadas and Barlow landed, in 1584, on the coast of the present State of North Carolina, the company of men, in the course of their exploration, came to a hill, from whence they looked down upon valleys “replenished with goodly cedar trees.” Discharging their harquebusses, there arose “such a flocke of cranes, the most part white, with such a cry redoubled by many ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted altogether.” The First Voyage to Virginia, Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. III, p. 302.
- ↑ Clayton’s Virginia, p. 29, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III.
of the men, like an Indian hup, hup, with an Oho! Oho! . . . Suddenly as men awaked out a dream, they began to search for their supposed enemies, but findeing none remained ever after very quiett.” See letter of Whitaker to Crashaw, Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 498. The Indians on this occasion may, while lying in ambush, have imitated the cry of the owl as a means of signalling to each other.
