The usually accepted notion that birds migrate from south to north in traveling to their breeding grounds is largely true of shore birds and waterfowl, but among many of the species of land birds conditions of topography tend to deflect a direct northward movement. The Atlantic coast plain, reaching up into southern New Jersey, and the Mississippi basin, each offers a broad south-to-north highway for birds leaving the Gulf shores of the United States on their northward journey in the spring. A great majority of species find in the wilderness of the Appalachian highland, from the Catskills to Georgia, breeding grounds quite as well adapted to their needs as the forests of Maine and Canada. Large numbers of birds, according to their regional relations, will constantly turn from the Atlantic coast plain up the numerous rivers, which become great highways of migration, leading to the highlands. The northward movement has thus a large westerly deflection on the Atlantic slope of the middle United States. It is also quite certain that many birds winter in favorable localities on the Atlantic coast plain much farther north than is generally supposed. This is especially true of the holly thickets among the coastwise sand dunes of southern New Jersey and the cedar swamps and pine barrens in the vicinity of Cape May. Many of the finches, the marsh wrens, red-winged blackbirds, meadow larks, thrashers, and myrtle warblers are frequently seen in these localities through the winter. I spent one first day of February some years ago among the dunes below Atlantic City, N. J. At Philadelphia that morning it was bleak winter weather, but two hours later we found ourselves in a warm expanse of sunlight on the seaward beaches. The balmy air was filled with bird notes, and the holly thickets and bay bushes fairly swarmed with myrtle warblers. It seems to be a fact that many birds thus make comparatively short migratory movements between the seacoast plain and the mountains, up and down the river valleys.