THE IPSWICH SPARROW. 37 



of many birds, greet the sun as it now and again pushed aside the fog 

 curtains with its long yellow rays. Bright days did not inspirit them, nor 

 did dull ones depress them. 



The first place to look for a musician is along the sky line of a neigh- 

 boring sand-hill, where he often may be descried, perched a few inches from 

 the ground on a tuft of grass, sometimes on the bare sand. He may choose, 

 however, a tiny thicket, a turfy hillock, the telephone wires or poles, or a 

 fence, from which vantage point a single trill may be all that is vouchsafed, 

 or the song may be repeated a few times. Wrapped in my coat, I have 

 plodded along, so shut in by the cold sheets of streaming fog that I could only 

 liken my surroundings to the sand-hills of our own coast during a winter's 

 snowstorm, and have listened in vain for some sign of the presence of the 

 Sparrows that I felt sure were in my vicinity. Presently one is discovered 

 walking about on the ground in search of food, and a few minutes later he 

 mounts a brown hummock, throws back his head, and breaks into song. 

 Others, far and near, promptly join in chorus, and for several minutes the 

 air fairly rings with answering songs. Then ensues a period of such 

 perfect silence, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, that it is hard to believe there 

 is a single bird within earshot. If, however, you will have patience, the 

 chorus will very possibly begin again. 



Nest and Eggs. 



No nest of the Ipswich Sparrow had hitherto been secured, and the 

 identification of the supposed eggs from Sable Island in the National 

 Museum (see Auk, I, 1884, 292 and 390) had rested on presumptive 

 probability rather than on satisfactory evidence. With these facts in mind, 

 I devoted much time to the search for nests on Sable Island, and had the 

 pleasure of examining nine or ten, from which five complete sets of eggs 

 were obtained. The other nests were either abandoned, or only partly 

 constructed when I left. On my arrival I was told that the ' Gray Birds' 

 usually began to lay in June. It soon became evident that some were 

 already incubating, and in view of the past season being considered a 

 backward one it is probable that in average seasons many of the sets are 

 completed by the last week in May. On June 2, after several days' 

 diligent search, I found the first nest ; and had I not been spying into all 

 sorts of likely and unlikely places I should never have looked in upon the 

 three fresh eggs it contained. As I afterwards learned, it was in an 

 unusual situation, being placed in a small tuft of beach-grass {Ammofhila 

 arenarla (jL.)), one of several bordering an expanse of soft, muddy bog at 



