406 NOTES ON THE 



ANTHUS SPRAUIJEII (Audubon). (700.) 

 SPRAGUE'S PIPIT.* 



It has been a matter of question whether we could give this 

 bird a just place amongst the bird fauna of this State, 

 notwithstanding its occasional capture near the Red river, but 

 it has been so often seen and carefully identified that all doubts 

 are forever removed. 



While by no means to be accounted common summer residents, 

 they are sufficiently numerous to be considered more than rare, 

 in the northern portions of the State to the British Possesions. 



I have found them more frequently in Pembina county than 

 otherwheres, but only so, I think it is probable, because my 

 opportunities have been greater to observe them there. In 

 traversing those sections I have employed a buckboard which 

 has made it possible to get a few" specimens, and to observe a 

 couple of nests which were occupied by the second brood, 

 presumptively, as it was in June, and Mr. Lewis has since 

 found them as early as April 23d in Clay county. 



Occasionally individuals have been secured in the lower belt 

 of counties, yet no nests have been reported from that section. 

 But I have had the pleasure of identifying Sprague's Lark 

 several times in the county in which I live, once within the 

 territory since included in the limits of the city corporation, 

 and breeding here as early as the 25th of March (1870). In 

 June I had the repeated exceptional pleasure of hearing its 

 song while mounting to an altitude of not less than seven, and 

 I think considerably more than eight hundred feet. The first 

 time that this transpired I was riding in company with a friend, 

 and on my way to collect birds, so that I was on the alert. I 

 had an excellent field glass with me, and at the moment in my 

 hand, as I saw the bird spring from the grass within a few 

 feet of my horse, and a little to the left of me. It flew a 

 hundred feet away with a succession of flits of the wings, 

 which lifted it about twenty feet into the air, when it turned 

 and with the same movements of the wings, came indirectly 

 tow^ards me, rising another twenty feet, or thereabouts, when 

 it again turned and began to sing with great enthusiasm, and 

 thus back and forth, each time a little increasing the length of 

 its zigzag undulations, it climbed upward, upward, upward, 



* When T wrote the ahove account of this species. I did not know that Captain 

 Blailiiston had observed it as early as May 4th, 1850, a fact which reached me at page 

 176 of North American Birds. 



