Note 44 — First, Of Birds.[34]

So Wood: “There are no magpies, jackdaws, cuckoos, jays, &c.”—New-England’s Prospect, l. c. Our author, in his Voyages, adds to the above list of New-England birds the following: “The partridge is larger than ours; white-flesht, but very dry: they are indeed a sort of partridges called grooses. The pidgeon, of which there are millions of millions.... The snow-bird, like a chaffinch, go in flocks, and are good meat.... Thrushes, with red breasts, which will be very fat, and are good meat.... Thressels, ... filladies, ... small singing-birds; ninmurders, little yellow birds; New-England nightingales, painted with orient colours,—black, white, blew, yellow, green, and scarlet,—and sing sweetly; wood-larks, wrens, swallows, who will sit upon trees; and starlings, black as ravens, with scarlet pinions. Other sorts of birds there are; as the troculus, wagtail or dish-water, which is here of a brown colour; titmouse,—two or three sorts; the dunneck or hedge-sparrow, who is starke naked in his winter nest; the golden or yellow hammer,—a bird about the bigness of a thrush, that is all over as red as bloud; woodpeckers of two or three sorts, gloriously set out with variety of glittering colours; the colibry, viemalin, or rising or walking-bird, an emblem of the resurrection, and the wonder of little birds. The water-fowl are these that follow: Hookers, or wild swans; cranes; ... four sorts of ducks,—a black duck, a brown duck like our wild ducks, a grey duck, and a great black and white duck. These frequent rivers and ponds. But, of ducks, there be many more sorts; as hounds, old wives, murres, doies, shell-drakes, shoulers or shoflers, widgeons, simps, teal, blew-wing’d and green-wing’d didapers or dipchicks, fenduck, duckers or moorhens, coots, pochards (a water-fowl like a duck), plungeons (a kind of water-fowl, with a long, reddish bill), puets, plovers, smethes, wilmotes (a kind of teal), godwits, humilities, knotes, red-shankes, ... gulls, white gulls or sea-cobbs, caudemandies, herons, grey bitterns, ox-eyes, birds called oxen and keen, petterels, king’s fishers, ... little birds that frequent the sea-shore in flocks, called sanderlins. They are about the bigness of a sparrow, and, in the fall of the leaf, will be all fat. When I was first in the countrie” (that is, in 1638; in which connection, what follows is not without its interest to us), “the English cut them into small pieces to put into their puddings, instead of suet. I have known twelve-score and above killed at two shots.... The cormorant, shape or sharke” (pp. 99-103).