BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 211^ 



Mount Auburn ; and in a grove of large chestnuts not far from the village of 

 Waverley. They began to appear late in September, and were most abundant 

 during October when very many were killed by our local collectors. Most of the 

 survivors departed early in November, but a few were noted at intervals during 

 the succeeding winter, and on June 17, 1882, Mr. Charles R. Lamb found a pair 

 breeding near the VVatertown Arsenal in some oak woods which have since given 

 place to a dense settlement of houses. The nest of this pair is now in my col- 

 lection. According to Mr. Lamb's notes "it was about forty feet above the 

 ground, in an entirely rotten tree, and contained two or more perfectly fresh 

 eggs which were broken, however, in the attempt to get the nest down." Dur- 

 ing this season another nest was found in the same neighborhood by Mr. M. 

 Abbott Frazar. He writes me that, as nearly as he can remember, it was in a 

 large hickory tree on the Adams estate, near School Street, in such a position 

 that he could not get at it. He thinks that the birds reoccupied it during the 

 following year. 



In 1883 a pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers attempted to breed in Cam- 

 bridge in a large dead elm which stood at the corner of Concord Avenue and 

 Buckingham Street within the grounds of St. Peter's (Roman Catholic) Church. 

 Here, as well as at several other places in the immediate neighborhood, the birds 

 were repeatedly noted by Mr. H. M. Spelman and Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne. 

 They drilled a hole — which I saw later that summer — in the south side of the 

 elm at a height of thirty-five or forty feet. Shortly after it was completed, and 

 probably before any eggs had been laid, — although as the nest was not opened 

 this cannot be positively asserted, — both birds suddenly disappeared. It was 

 reported at the time that they had so seriously disturbed the meditations of 

 Father O'Brien, the resident priest, by their incessant drumming on a resonant 

 branch of the old tree, that he had had them shot. Dr. Chadbourne tells me, 

 however, that he has reason to believe that one of them was killed or, at least, 

 mortally wounded, by a certain eager young Cambridge collector of that period. 



The earliest definite record of the breeding of the Red-headed Woodpecker 

 in the immediate neighborhood of Boston appears to be that by Mr. Purdie ' of a 

 nest containing five eggs which was found by Mr. H. K. Job in June, 1878, in 

 a hole of an apple tree in Brookline. According to a statement made to me 

 by the late Mr. Gordon Plummer, several additional nests of this Woodpecker 

 were discovered in Brookline in the summer of 1882. Another and still more 

 recent instance of breeding in a locality equally near the confines of the Cam- 

 bridge Region, is that originally reported by Mr. Torrey,^ of a pair which suc- 



1 H. A. Purdie, Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, VII, 1882, 57. 

 ^ B. Torrey, Auk, XVIII, 1901, 394. 



