DELAWARK VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 17 



fashion with its bill. It caught no bird during the several hours 

 i watched it, but I noticed that no small birds were about while 

 it was perched aloft there, though the neighborhood earlier in 

 the season had been thick with Indigo-birds, Song Sparrows and 

 Field Sparrows, and though later many sorts of sparrows were 

 gathered here in large flocks. 



Further up Dutch Hill where the narrow stony road runs 

 between stone walls shoulder-high are buckwheat fields and 

 bare pastures. There were always Vesper Sparrows, Field 

 Sparrows and Grasshopper Sparrows on the ground and walls, 

 and in the air Swallows swooping in great circles about the 

 cattle. Toward the middle of August great flocks of Bluebirds 

 loitered here on their way to and from the huckleberry barrens 

 northward, filling the air with such gurghng music as I had 

 never heard even in spring. And here on August 18 I came 

 upon my surprise of the summer. I was coming down hill 

 across lots when I heard behind me low calls of " weet, weet, 

 weet," about like those of Horned Larks in winter, I thought, 

 and turning I saw scudding close to the ground like sandpipers 

 over water a flock of small birds with yellowish breasts marked 

 with black. As they passed me I saw that their backs were 

 grayish and that there was white on their tails. They lit, some 

 on the ground, some on a stone wall, and walked. I was inno- 

 cent of the knowledge that Prairie Horned Larks are sometimes 

 seen in northeastern Pennsylvania until I got home to the books 

 and I was utterly unable to identify the birds. The owner of 

 the lot, lifting great boulders out of the ground with a great tri- 

 pod and lever arrangement, was appealed to. He said, "Only 

 some kind of sparrows," and when I pointed out to him that 

 they walked instead of hopping, he looked at me rather pity- 

 ingly and said, " Don't sparrows walk?" But I was no nearer 

 an identification than he, although had they not walked I would 

 have thought him not so far from the truth, and guessed Dick- 

 cissels, for they seemed something like descriptions of these 

 birds I carried in memory, and I had always been hoping that 

 Dickcissels might come my way. 



At Levis Falls, beyond Dutch Hill, and at Gravel's Swamp 

 under Wismer were Solitary Sandpipers, for whose nests I 



