12 BULLETIN 17 9, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



slithering back to his watchtower, proclaiming victory with an 

 explosion of stuttering notes. 



Spring. — Unlike most of our migrant birds, the kingbird arrives 

 in New England unobtrusively — about the tenth of May in the lati- 

 tude of Boston — and for a few days remains quiet, both in voice 

 and demeanor. We are apt to see our first kingbird of the season 

 sitting silent and alone on a fencepost or a wire or making a short 

 flight out from a tree and back again. It appears listless, as if 

 not interested in its surroundings, as if it were tired. There is 

 none of the exuberance of the Baltimore oriole, in full song when 

 he returns to his breeding ground, or of the showy arrival of the 

 bronzed grackles as they come pouring into New England in vast 

 clattering hordes. It is not long, however, before the kingbird throws 

 off his lethargy and appears in his true colors — the tyrant of tyrants. 



Alexander F. Skutch has sent Mr. Bent an excellent account of the 

 kingbird's northward passage through Central America, where, dur- 

 ing the early stages of their long journey, the birds are concentrated 

 in large numbers. He says : "Although only a bird of passage through 

 the great isthmus that stretches from Tehuantepec to Darien, the 

 kingbird, because of its large size, active habits, and its custom of 

 migrating by day in flocks, is the most conspicuous of the flycatch- 

 ers that visit Central America from the north. The birds appear to 

 enter Central America from their winter home in South America 

 about April 1, and the last do not leave the region until nearly the 

 middle of May. 



"Kingbirds travel chiefly in the early morning and the latter half 

 of the afternoon. At these times I have on numerous occasions 

 watched them fly overhead in loose-straggling flocks of irregular 

 formation^ sometimes containing, according to a rough estimate, more 

 than a hundred individuals. Thus, soon after dawn on April 28, 

 1935, as I was paddling along the shore of Barro Colorado Island in 

 the Canal Zone, a large flock of kingbirds flew across Gatun Lake 

 from east to west, or from the South American to the North Amer- 

 can side. They came to rest in the tops of some small trees from 

 which a few birds made sallies into the air to snatch up insects, but 

 after a pause of a minute or so they continued on toward the west. 



"During both years of my residence at Rivas, in the deep, narrow, 

 north-and-south valley of the Eio Buena Vista in southern Costa 

 Rica, I witnessed numerous northward flights of kingbirds in April, 

 always in the afternoon. On April 18, 1936, about half-past four in 

 the afternoon, I beheld several multitudinous flocks of small birds 

 come up the valley from the south, a few minutes apart, flying high 

 and straight as if they were journeying. There were barn swallows, 

 rough-winged swallows, kingbirds, and small black swifts. The 



