l68 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



Bay Basin, thirty or more years ago, and Mr. M. Abbott Frazar once showed 

 me a set of four eggs which a boy had taken (in 1880 or 188 1, if I remember 

 rightly) on some filled land now occupied by the Back Bay Fens. Another pair 

 almost certainly bred in June, 1903, on the Cambridge side of the Basin not far 

 from the northern end of Harvard Bridge where, on a wide expanse of flat, 

 gravelly land that has replaced the salt marsh of earlier days, both birds were 

 repeatedly seen together during the first half of the month by several Cambridge 

 ornithologists, among whom were Mr. Walter Fa.xon and Mr. Ralph Hoffmann. 



I have met with the Killdeer only twice in the Cambridge Region — in 

 April, about 1865, when I flushed a shy, noisy bird in a ploughed field at the 

 eastern end of the Brickyard Swamp, and on June 30, 1898, when I spent an 

 hour or more watching a pair that had settled for the season near the same 

 locality in a large, well-drained clay-pit, the bottom of which was in most places 

 covered with a dense growth of short, wild grasses and white clover, although 

 there were also wide spaces of bare, clayey earth and occasional pools of water. 

 The presence of these birds was made known to me by Mr. O. A. Lothrop who, 

 with his friend, Mr. Alton H. Hathaway, had had one if not both of them under 

 close observation for upwards of four weeks. They were seen together, how- 

 ever, only on the occasion just mentioned, when they behaved as if they had 

 young, but my search for the latter proved as fruitless as had been that pre- 

 viously made for the eggs by Messrs. Lothrop and Hathaway. These birds 

 were not noted after July 2, nor did they return to the clay -pit the following 

 year. 



In November, 1888, immense numbers of Killdeer Plover invaded New 

 England, driven, it is supposed, from the South by a violent storm.' Many of 

 them spent the entire winter in Massachusetts, and one was killed by Dr. W. 

 P. Coues on December 25, of the year just mentioned,^ in the Longfellow 

 Marshes, not far from where the Harvard University Boathouse now stands. 

 This specimen is the only one known to me that has ever been actually taken in 

 the region covered by the present Memoir, but I have another — a fine adult 

 male — which was shot in Newtonville by Mr. C. J. Maynard on April 7, 1873. 

 There is a recent record of a bird which was seen in a ploughed field at Belmont 

 on October 19, 1901.^ 



' A. P. Chadbourne, Auk, VI, 1889, 255-263. 



2 [Editor,] Ornithologist and Oologist, XIV, 1889, 14. 



' H. M. Turner and R. .S. Eustis, Auk, XL\, 1902, 78. 



