38 BULLETIN l-iG;, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



mud. Some were found where the water was a few inches deep and 

 some where the mud was drying." 



Eggs. — ^The eggs of the western willet are indistinguishable fron^ 

 those of the eastern bird. There is a slight average difference in 

 length, but the measurements widely overlap. The measurements of 

 56 eggs average 54.1 by 37.6 millimeters; the eggs showing the four 

 extremes measure 58.1 by 39.4, 50.5 by 39.7, and 54.9 by 35 milli- 

 meters. 



Plumages. — The sequence of plumages and molts is the same for 

 both races, but juvenal western birds are somewhat paler than east- 

 ern birds, and they have less barring on the tail feathers or none 

 at all. 



Fall. — From its breeding grounds in the interior the western willet 

 migrates in three main directions to the seacoasts, almost due east to 

 the Atlantic coast of New York and New England, southeast and 

 south to the south Atlantic and Gulf coasts and southwest to the 

 California coast. Probably the birds which breed east of the Eocky 

 Mountains take the easterly and southerly routes and those which 

 breed west of these mountains migrate to California. Most of the 

 willets which we get in Massachusetts in August are immature west- 

 ern willets; I have never seen an adult. These 3'Oung birds appar- 

 ently come from the Great Lakes region, where they have been 

 recorded in Illinois and Ohio and as far north as Toronto, Ontario. 

 John T. Nichols says in his notes : 



Along the bays and marshes of the south shore of Long Island the willet is 

 a regular late-summer migrant in small numbers varying from year to year. 

 Southbound shore birds of other species are now following this coast to the 

 westward, but a large majority of the willet are moving in the opposite direc- 

 tion; that is, from west to east. Its maximum flight seems to come in the 

 beginning of August, and a peak of abundance for the species was reached in 

 1923. At Mastic on August 4, 1923, 14 willet were counted passing west to 

 east in 3 flocks during 2% hours' observation. 



I have examined a number of specimens of these Long Island fall-migration 

 willet, which have all been in the grey unmarked plumage of birds of the year 

 (which I would not undertake to distinguish from adult fresh winter plumage), 

 and remarkably uniform in size. Their bills varied scarcely at all in dimen- 

 sions (slightly over 2^/4 inches), being decidedly too long for the short-billed 

 "Virginia breeding bird, but much too short for the long-billed bird from the 

 Dakotas (unless its young of the year are uniformly short-billed). 



Whiter. — Western willets mingle in winter with their eastern rela- 

 tives on the South Atlantic and Gulf coast from Florida to Texas ; 

 they are especially abundant in Texas. They also winter abundantly 

 from the coast of California southward. Bradford Torrey (1913) 

 saw them, mixed with marbled godwits, near San Diego, in such 

 numbers that he — 



mistook them at first for a border of some kind of herbiage. Thousands there 

 must have been ; and when they rose at my approach they made something like 



