The Birds of Connecticut

Economic Ornithology - - Introduction Facing Long Island Sound for practically all of its hundred miles of southern border, Connecticut shows a succession of low, rocky promontories and sandy beaches divided by shallow bays and salt marshes. The latter stretch for valying distances northward, but soon give place to rather broad stream valleys, separated by gently rising hills. These hills, usually low and rounded at the coast, when not dikes or sheets of trap, as near New Haven, become rapidly more mountainous in the northwestern part of the state, culminating in Bear Mountain in the extreme comer, 2,354 feet in altitude and sixty miles from the Sound. The soil of these hills is usually poor and shallow, while that of many of the valleys is deep and rich, so that, while the lowlands are well cultivated and thickly settled, the uplands are generally left to brush land or forest. From this configuration it will be evident that most of the streams are short and flow in a southerly direction. Three main river courses cross the state - the Thames on the east, which for its lower quarter is practicdly an arm of the sea, and above that hardly more than a small stream the Connecticut, which passes through the center, in a broad and fertile valley in its Upper course, and in a narrow valley hemmed in by highlands below Portland and the Housatonic in the western part, with a narrow and much more mountainous valley..........