148 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



tions hearing in October, 183 1, among the reeds at Fresh Pond were not, as he 

 supposed, of this species, but Carolina Rails. No such doubt can attach, how- 

 ever, to the bird which he examined and which, he says, was surprised and shot 

 " while feeding on insects or seeds, by the margin of a small pool, overgiown 

 with the leaves of the water lily," apparently " in the vicinity of West Cam- 

 bridge " (now Arlington). 1 



There is a specimen of the Yellow Rail in the New England collection 

 of the Boston Society of Natural History, labelled " male, near Boston, Mass., 

 Dr. S. Cabot," which probably was taken in Cambridge, as the following e.xtract 

 from a letter written a few years since by the late Mr. Edward C. Cabot to the 

 late Mr. Foster H. Brackett will show : " When my brother [Dr. Samuel Cabot] 

 was in college, 1832-36, I was in the habit of shooting with him on the Fresh 

 Pond marshes. ... At the time I refer to, the mouth of the brook [/. e. the outlet 

 of the pond] where there was a patch of wild rice, was the resort of wild ducks, 

 water hen and rail, and I have no doubt that these birds [the Yellow Rail and a 

 Florida Gallinule, also in the collection of the Boston Society] were found there 

 though I have no recollection of facts in regard to these specimens." 



To these early records I can add only two of more recent date, viz., that 

 of a bird in the collection of Messrs. E. A. and O. Bangs which they found dead 

 on September 13, 1876, at the eastern (Belmont) end of Rock Meadow, and 

 that of a specimen in the Museum of Comparative Zoology which Mr. Alfred 

 L. Danielson shot on October 14, 1878, in the Charles River Marshes opposite 

 the Watertown Arsenal. 



It is strange that the Yellow Rail has not been met with of late years in 

 the Fresh Pond Swamps, for it is not very uncommon in autumn at Wayland 

 and the late Mr. C. I. Goodale used to take it cjuite regularly, in both spring and 

 autumn, in a meadow at Wakefield, while in September, 1895, Mr. J. H. Bowles 

 shot two birds, and started two others which he did not attempt to kill, on a 

 small floating island in Ponkapog Pond, Canton. These localities lie, it will be 

 observed, about equidistant from the Cambridge Region in three different 

 directions. 



[Porzana jamaicensis (Gniel.). Black Rail. Although the Black Rail has never been 

 taken nor even, so far as I am aware, seen, in the Cambridge Region there are good grounds for 

 suspecting that it has not only occurred but bred there within recent years. The evidence on 

 which this suspicion rests has been presented so fully by me in an article entitled 'An Ornitho- 



i T. Nuttall, Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada. The Water Birds, 

 1834, 216. 



