1188 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part 2 



hundreds of other plant and animal specimens were carried thousands 

 of miles by canoe and portage, and eventually to England. Here 

 WilHam Swainson, the eminent English zoologist, described the species 

 and named it Emberiza pallida, the Clay-coloured BuntUng (Swainson 

 and Richardson, 1831). The type was deposited in the University 

 Museum, Cambridge, England. 



John J. Audubon (1844), thinking he had discovered a new species, 

 named the bird Emberiza Shattuckii, Shattuck's bunting, after his 

 young friend, George C. Shattuck, M.D., of Boston, who accompanied 

 Audubon on his voyage to Labrador in the summer of 1833. 



Sir John Richardson (Swainson and Richardson, 1831) writes: "It 

 frequents the farm-yard at Carlton-house, and it is as familiar and 

 confident as the common House Sparrow of England," J. J. Audu- 

 bon (1844) states: "Abundant throughout the country bordering the 

 Upper Missouri." Apparently this sparrow has held its own against 

 the pressure of civilization, for the species appears to be almost as 

 abundant as when first discovered. Loss of breeding sites was in- 

 evitable as brushy land was converted to crop land; S. pallida no 

 longer breeds in Iowa and Illinois. Compensation for the loss of 

 breeding territory is the extension of breeding range eastward and 

 northward during the present century. J. Van Tyne (1941) cites as 

 evidence records in Michigan in 1901, 1904, 1914, and 1925, and 

 suggests, as a cause of the spread, lumbering that was followed in 

 ecological succession by a habitat in which the clay-color is usually 

 found. Similarly, L. L. Snyder (1957b) details its range extension into 

 the lower Great Lakes region of southern Ontario in recent years. 



Spring. — ^Leaving their main winter home in Mexico, migrants 

 regularly cross our southern border from Texas to Arizona during 

 late March and April. For more than 2 months the birds move north- 

 ward in successive waves across the Great Plains and prairies. Wil- 

 liam Youngworth writes me that at Sioux City, Iowa, he observed 

 two to three mass flights of 25 to 100 birds each spring from 1929 to 

 1957. Arrival dates there ranged between May 8 and 20, with scat- 

 tered arrivals building up to a mass movement, then diminishing. 

 Mrs. I. D. Acord reported peak numbers still at Amarillo, Texas, on 

 May 10-11, 1958, although a mass first arrival of S. pallida and 

 S. passerina had occurred at Regina, Saskatchewan, on May 9, 1958, 

 as reported by Robert W. Nero (Aaron M. Bagg, 1958). W. Ray 

 Salt (1966) states that pallida arrived in the Edmonton, Alberta, dis- 

 trict during the first week of May in 1964, but that the males did not 

 firmly estabhsh their territories until about the middle of the month. 



In migration the species occurs commonly in mesquite and other 

 desert shrubs, in thickets, copses, weed patches, and grass, and shows 

 a preference for borders of fields, woods, roads, and streams. The 



