BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 223 



117. Tyrannus tyrannus (Linn.). 

 Kingbird. 



Common summer resident. 



SEASONAL OCCURRENCE. 



April 27, 1897, one seen, Arlington, W. Faxon. 



May 5 — September i. 

 September 11, 1891, one seen, Arlington, W. Faxon. 



NESTING DATES. 



May 30 — June 8. 



The Kingbird occurs in the greatest numbers at its seasons of migration, 

 but it also breeds very commonly throughout most of the Cambridge Region, 

 especially where there are old orchards and fields or pastures sprinkled with 

 isolated oaks and scraggy wild apple trees. In the days of my youth there were 

 many such fields and orchards in parts of Cambridge which are now thickly 

 covered with houses, and the Kingbird inhabited most of them in summer. I 

 remember when it bred regularly and rather plentifully in the country lying 

 between Sparks Street and Fresh Pond and more sparingly in that immediately 

 to the northward of the Botanic Garden. I even saw it occasionally in June on 

 Dana Hill, Cambridgeport, when I was in the High School (i 865-1 869). It 

 nested for the last time in our garden in 1884. Since then it has ceased to pay 

 us anything more than fleeting migratory visits, although I continue to find it 

 in June and July in the neighborhood of Fresh Pond and Mount Auburn. It 

 used to frequent the marshes along Charles River in late summer, appearing 

 there in small, straggling flocks with the southward-bound flights of Swallows. 

 Its gradual retirement from the greater part of Cambridge has been due, no 

 doubt, chiefly to the contemporaneous building up of vacant lots and the rapid 

 increase and dispersion of shade trees, for the Kingbird is never really at home 

 save where there are wide spaces of open land (or water). 



Mr. T. B. Bergen has reported ^ seeing a Kingbird in Cambridge on April 

 16, 1898, a date so e.xceptionally early that one cannot help suspecting that 

 some mistake was made in respect to the observation. 



I T. B. Bergen, Auk, XV, 1898, 268-269. 



