492 BULLETIN 203, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



of the most characteristic voices in the bird chorus. This song is a 

 pleasant surprise to one accustomed only to its metallic alarm note. 

 For the past two summers, 1942 and 1943, a favorite singing perch 

 of one of these birds has been the top of a 30-foot radio antenna pole 

 in the middle of the village and only a few feet from an Eskimo cabin 

 door. From this perch the song rings to both ends of the village, a 

 half mile distant each way." 



Fall.— Willisim. T. Shaw (MS.) thus pleasantly portrays an early 

 stage in the fall migration of Grimiell's waterthrush: "When mid- 

 August nights are cool in Saskatchewan and one awakens to morning 

 sunrays slanting over low, wild meadows that glisten lightly with 

 the wliite of frost, presently there comes from the margin of the 

 sedge-grown, spring-fed lakelet nearby the sharp, evenly spaced call 

 note of the waterthrush, early reminder of the southern drift of mi- 

 gration. Here, on August 20, 1943, this bird first came down out of 

 the northern territory on its way out. It is water-loving and inhabits 

 moist rims of streams and lakelets, comfortably shaded by trembling 

 aspen, black poplar, and willow. It is noticeably solitary, more 

 rarely coming in pairs during migration. Through the past few 

 years, it has arrived with dependable regularity beside my camp at 

 Livelong, in northwestern Saskatchewan, remaining a week or ten 

 days through storm or shine as the weather happens to come, before 

 it passes on. To find it, look low by the water's edge, among the outer 

 radiating willow stems, now lightly touched with yellow tints of 

 Autumn, where shade has all but banished grass growth, and dark, 

 damp prairie soil soon emerges into the waters of the pool ; there is 

 found this oddly marked, graceful bird of trim sparrow size, but in 

 mannerism and habit one uniquely set aside unto itself." 



Arthur T. Wayne (1920) evidently considered Grimiell's water- 

 thrush to be the prevailing form in South Carolina on migrations. 

 He writes : "On one occasion during a heavy rain storm one night in 

 September — I think on September 12, 1912 — I saw vast hosts of Water- 

 Thrushes in a swamp near my house on the morning of that day, 

 there being in sight hundreds in the area of a hundred square feet, 

 and I estimated that there must have been certainly twenty-five thou- 

 sand or even more birds in the portion of the swamp I explored that 

 day." 



SEIURUS NOVEBORACENSIS LIMNAEUS McCabe and Miller 



BRITISH COLUMBIA SMALL-BILLED WATERTHRUSH 



HABITS 



Thomas T. McCabe and Alden H. Miller (1933) have published a 

 study of the geographic variation in the northern waterthrushes, to 

 which the reader is referred, as it is too long to include here. From 



