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CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES.


I have seen pelicans, geese, Lewis's woodpecker and others crossing between eight and nine thousand feet above sea level. Mountain quail cross on foot, some of them making a journey of sixty or eighty miles, no matter how deep the snow in spring, returning in fall, sometimes over a foot or two of snow on the divide, leaving their summer resorts where there is no snow, to reach their well known winter home. A great many of the summer visitants enter the San Joaquin Valley by the Tehachapi Pass, altitude 4,000 feet. Col. N. A. Goss, in the spring of 1884, noticed terns at Julian, San Diego County, altitude 4,500 feet, "crossing from the Gulf of California to the Pacific." Mr. Walter J. Morgan saw an immense migration of sand-hill cranes and geese which lasted about two weeks, by day and night, from Ensenada, Lower California, to Port San Felipe, on the Gulf, in Oct. and Nov., 1884, much of the Peninsula between these localities being no less than 4,000 feet above sea level.

Probably a great many small birds take nearly the same course in fall, cross near the head of the Gulf and spend the winter in Mexico. Mr. F. Stephens, who has collected a long time in San Bernardino Valley, says the spring migrants enter that valley from the southeast and return in an opposite direction in fall. He thinks a great many cross the Gulf of California from Mexico.

As the names of all correspondents are connected with the information they furnished, it is not necessary to name them elsewhere.

The authorities quoted, sparingly in most instances, but in their own language, usually, or a part of it, are:

Dr. J. S. Newberry. Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean. Vol. 6, part 4, number 2, War Department.