BIRDS HUNTED FOR FOOD OR SPORT. 243 



a chance to gain some knowledge of the flight. As Maine 

 and the provinces He well to the eastward, we might expect 

 many of the southward-moving birds to follow the coast, or 

 even to cross Ipswich Bay and the Bay of Fundy on their 

 w^ay, as other land birds do. But "Woodcock fly largely on 

 moonlit nights, and so low that it is probable that they do not 

 often purposely start out to cross large bodies of water. They 

 may be blown off shore occasionallj^ by sudden gales, and this 

 may account for a bag of Woodcock brought into a hotel in 

 Provincetown in 1868, and reported to me by Mr. Alfred S. 

 Swan. These birds probably were blown off the land by 

 some northwesterly gale, and, being unable to make land 

 anywhere else, reached the end of Cape Cod. Woodcock are 

 not common there and probably rarely breed on that sandy 

 soil. Those flight birds which follow the coast probably mostly 

 cross Cape Cod below Plymouth, and turn westward into 

 Rhode Island or Connecticut, or follow down the west shore of 

 Buzzards Bay. Possibly some of them keep on down the shore 

 of Cape Cod Bay as long as it trends southward, and thus 

 land in Sandwich and even in Barnstable, crossing the Cape, as 

 many birds do, at the most southerly indentation of its north- 

 ern shore, that forms the entrance to Barnstable harbor, — 

 the narrowest point of the arm of Cape Cod, where the towns 

 of Barnstable and Yarmouth meet. Here at Yarmouthport 

 Mr. Stephen W. Fuller reports that flight Woodcock pass 

 through in August. 



Counting Provincetown as the hand of Cape Cod, Truro 

 forms the wrist. Mr. Willard M. Small states that a few flight 

 Woodcock come there each year. This seems to indicate that 

 a few are blown off the coast annually and find rest near the 

 end of the Cape. Correspondents in all the other Cape towns, 

 down the forearm to the elbow at Chatham, and from there 

 to the middle of the arm at Yarmouth, report the Woodcock 

 as very rare. From Yarmouth until we reach the mainland 

 at Plymouth similar reports prevail, but at Hyannis, nearly 

 south from Yarmouth on the south side of the Cape, two 

 gunners, Mr. John S. Nicholson and Mr. Frank G. Thacher, 

 report flight birds. Mr. Nicholson, who has had over fifty 



