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Updated: June 23, 2025
Douglass believed, moreover, that this exodus did not conform to the "laws of civilizing migration," as the carrying of a language, literature and the like of a superior race to an inferior; and it did not conform to the geographic laws assuring healthy migration from east to west in the same latitude, as this was from south to north, far away from the climate in which the migrants were born.
In some migrants the males arrive before the females, and no sooner have they recovered from the effects of their journey than they burst out into rapturous singing; these are not love-strains, since the females have not yet arrived, and pairing-time is perhaps a mouth distant; their singing merely expresses their overflowing gladness.
But all the migrants have not left us yet by any means, and we had better leave our boreal visitors until mid-winter's blasts show us these hardiest of the hardy at their best. We know little of the ways of the gaunt herons on their southward journey, but day after day, in the marshes and along the streams, we may see the great blues as they stop in their flight to rest for a time.
We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at the north.
This Territory of Missouri, extending from the southern boundary of the State of Arkansas to the Canadian line, received its share of Western migrants. It embraced the heart of the continent.
The small plantation or wooded bank may hold a Nightingale one year, but we miss its song there the next; the osier bed or gorse-covered common which vibrates with the trill of the Grasshopper-Warbler one April is deserted the following season; the plantation which is occupied by a host of common migrants this summer may be enlivened next year by the song of the rarer Marsh-Warbler also; and so on.
We can best realize the perfection of this instinct when we consider that all these migrants, including the young which have never hitherto strayed beyond the small area of their home where every tree and bush and spring and rock is familiar to them, rush suddenly away as if blown by a wind to unknown lands and continents beyond the seas to a distance of from a thousand to six or seven thousand miles; that after long months spent in those distant places, which in turn have grown familiar to them, they return again to their natal place, not in a direct but ofttimes by a devious route, now north, now north-east, now east or west, keeping to the least perilous lines and crossing the seas where they are narrowest.
It is doubtful if any other urge than a religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the past century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their singular labors in the exquisite and benighted isles of the tropics.
As has been said, both these birds are summer migrants, the nightingale arriving on our shores about the middle of April, the nightjar perhaps a fortnight later.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north.
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