DELAWARE VALLEY ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 19 



I find by a careful examination of our correspondence during 

 the period between 1877 and 1883 that Mr. Collins' notes on 

 this species represent a most continuous and valuable set of 

 data regarding the status of this bird on the Atlantic coast plain, 

 during its period of final extinction as a summer resident in an 

 area where it was very abundant locally during the lives of Wil- 

 son and Audubon. They show too that its disappearance from 

 the Delaware Valley was contemporary with its final adieu as a 

 summer resident in the District of Columbia. Coues and 

 Prentiss, in their list of 1861, call it an abundant summer resi- 

 dent around Washington, but in 1883 they say of it: ''Now, 

 however, the bird appears to have forsaken us, few, if any, 

 being heard of for the past few years. ' ' In Massachusetts, their 

 northeastern breeding limit, where they never were abundant 

 as in the Middle States, the records show a similar dwindling 

 down to about 1880, all the last breeding records occurring in 

 the seventies. It was my off-hand opinion before consulting 

 these records that the extinction of this species was sudden, 

 indicating a catastrophe during migration or at some critical 

 period in the bird's winter life in the tropics which had involved 

 the whole eastern contingent of Dickcissels. But such does not 

 seem to have been the case. Our earliest accounts of the bird, 

 given by Wilson, Audubon and Nuttall, show it to have been 

 abundant in the Delaware Valley in all places suited to it, es- 

 pecially in meadows and low-lying grass fields in the clay-loam 

 districts, but not in sandy or light soils or at higher elevations. 



Briefly stated, it was in such situations a universally common 

 and familiar bird. My friend, Dr. S. W. Woodhouse, who was 

 the companion of Nuttall and other Philadelphia bird-hunters 

 in the early forties, says that this was also the status of the 

 Dickcissel at that time. During the fifties and sixties the records 

 are meagre, but there are enough data to show that the bird was 

 fairly abundant in Connecticut, Long Island, near Hoboken, 

 N. J. , and in the District of Columbia, up to late in the sixties 

 and probably later. But in the early seventies, when I first 

 began to take intelligent notice of birds, the Dickcissel was not 

 to be found breeding in any part of Camden county, New Jersey, 

 as in Dr. Woodhouse' s time, nor was it known in those parts of 



