268 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



154. Passerculus princeps Maynard. 

 Ipswich Sparrow. 



Rare transient visitor. 



Few of our so-called ' shore birds ' compare with the Ipswich Sparrow in 

 respect to the tenacity with which it clings to the seacoast. In March, when it 

 is passing northward on its way to Sable Island (its only known breeding ground), 

 and during the southward migration in October and Nov^ember, it appears regu- 

 larly, and at times really numerously, on the sand dunes and beach ridges near 

 Ipswich, Swampscott, Revere, Nantasket, and other places directly on the coast 

 of Massachusetts, but it rarely wanders inland, even for distances of only a few 

 miles. It has been twice taken in the Cambridge Region, however: by Mr. 

 Charles R. Lamb in the Fresh Pond Swamps, on October 20, 1883, and by Dr. 

 A. H. Tuttle on the northwestern side of the Back Bay Basin in Cambridgeport, 

 on October 23, 1905. Mr. Lamb tells me that his specimen (a male, now in my 

 collection) ^ was found in company with some Savanna Sparrows in the marsh 

 which borders the western side of the Glacialis, where it alighted among the 

 branches of a small, isolated oak, after having been twice flushed from the 

 meadow grass. Dr. Tuttle's bird (a mounted specimen which I have recently 

 examined and which also appears to be a male, although the sex was not deter- 

 mined by dissection) was killed about three hundred yards to the westward of 

 the Cambridge end of Harvard Bridge. Here a wide expanse of level, gravelly 

 land, created by filling only a few years since and as yet unoccupied by buildings, 

 has become covered by beds of rank weeds which, as I am informed by Dr. Tuttle, 

 afford food and shelter in autumn for many migratory Fringilline birds. Of these 

 the Savanna Sparrow, the Song Sparrow, and the J unco occur most frequently 

 and numerously. There were several Savanna Sparrows with the Ipswich Spar- 

 row when the latter was shot. 



At a meeting of the Nuttall Ornithological Club held on April 21, 1890, 

 Mr. C. F. Batchelder reported that Mr. W. A. Jeffries (whose reliability in 

 respect to such an observation is not open to question) had seen and fully identi- 

 fied an Ipswich Sparrow about ten days previously, in Beacon Street, Boston. 

 Mr. Jeffries does not now remember this experience very distinctly, but he thinks 

 that the bird was probably not actually in Beacon Street, but in the passageway 

 along the river, behind the line of houses next the water. 



' No. 25,117, collection of William Brewster. 



