46 DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS. 
always running, chasing each other, very 
quarrelsome, fighting all the time. They 
were in poor condition, so lean that the men 
did not shoot them after the first day, a fact 
which gives your correspondent great satis- 
faction. They are still there! My brother 
came from the Shoals yesterday, and says 
that the place is alive with them, all the 
seven islands.” 
Similar facts were reported —as I began 
in one way and another to learn — from 
different points along the coast; especially 
from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where hun- 
dreds of the birds were seen on the 28th and 
29th. of November. The reporter of this 
item?! pertinently adds: “Such a flight of 
killdeer in Maine — where the bird is well 
known to be rare—has probably not oc- 
curred before within the memory of living 
sportsmen.’ Here, asatthe Isles of Shoals, 
the visitors were at first easily shot (they are 
not counted among game birds where they 
are known, on account of their habitual lean- 
ness, I suppose); but they had landed upon 
inhospitable shores, and were not long in 
1 Mr. N. C. Brown, in The Auk, January, 1889, 
page 69. 
