140 



MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



At every season during the earlier years of my experience most of the 

 Night Herons which frequented the Cambridge Region, roosted by day in the 

 Fresh Pond Swamps and fed by night in the salt marshes and creeks along 

 Charles River, crossing and recrossing the intervening upland singly or in small 

 flocks, in the evening and morning twilight. The morning flight passed almost 

 unnoticed, — save by ornithologists and sportsmen, — but in the warm, midsum- 

 mer evenings, when nearly every one was out of doors, the big birds, sweeping 

 like ghostly shadows just above the tops of the trees, uttering their loud, hoarse 

 calls at frequent intervals, attracted very general attention. Most of them 

 passed over Brattle Street at or very near Elmwood, but they also appeared 

 regularly over our own place, and in August, — when they were especially 

 numerous, — we sometimes saw or heard as many as fifteen or twenty there 

 in the course of a single evening. 



The Night Heron is not known to have occurred in midwinter near Cam- 

 bridge prior to 1875. In December of that year eight or ten birds appeared in 

 the white pine grove at Elmwood where they remained through January and 

 February, 1876. Mr. Lowell reported their presence in the 'Boston Daily 

 Advertiser' for February 12, 1876, and on the evening of the 17th of that month 

 I saw them leave the grove and fly towards the neighboring salt marshes. For 

 upwards of twenty years later a varying but usually somewhat smaller number 

 continued to frequent the Elmwood pines in winter, and a few others were occa- 

 sionally met with at that season in the cedar and pitch pine woods to the west- 

 ward of Mount Auburn,' as well as in the Hemlock Grove at Fresh Pond. A 

 small wintering colony was also discovered in Longwood, Brookline, during the 

 latter part of this period. 



Since the woods about Pout Pond and near Little i-liver were cut down, the 

 Cambridge Night Herons have become widely scattered and greatly reduced in 

 numbers. I have seen none of late in the Fresh Pond Swamps, and within the 

 past two or three years they have nearly or quite ceased to visit the marshes 

 along Charles River. I am told that they continue to occur sparingly about the 

 shores of the Mystic Ponds as well as at Great Meadow, but I fear that the time 

 is not far distant when they will no longer be found regularly in any part of the 

 Cambridge Region. 



'I have two specimens taUen in this locality by Mr. II. M. Spelman, one, no. 10.187, o" J^"' 

 uary 25, 1879, the other, no. io,iS6, on February 1 of the same year. 



