^"'igoy^] General Notes. 295 



sized second-growth spruce trees ; while in a few places these have lately 

 been cut, leaving brush-heaped and bramble-covered clearings, with small 

 clumps of spruce saplings ; and these tracts are the breeding ground of 

 many Song and White-throated Sparrows. The general aspect of the 

 place is so northern, and its summer avifauna includes so many more or 

 less strictly Canadian species, such as Swainson's Thrushes, Olive-sided 

 Flycatchers, Winter Wrens, Loons, Brown Creepers, Myrtle and Mag- 

 nolia Warblers, etc., that one is tempted to the hope of finding some still 

 more northern birds breeding there. 



As I was walking along the shore of this lake, at one of the cleared and 

 scrubby points, without a gun, on the afternoon of July 28, 1900, a small 

 sparrow, holding something in its bill, hopped onto a bush-top about four 

 yards ahead of me, and fluttered from twig to twig, chirping anxiously. 

 At first glance I saw that it looked wrong for a Song Sparrow, and at the 

 second, as the bird flew to a still nearer bush, that it was an unmistakable, 

 clearly marked Lincoln's. Flying back and forth from one bit of scrub 

 to another, with all the actions of a bird disturbed over an intruder's near 

 approach to its nest, it stayed in plain sight before me, at a distance vary- 

 ing from three to six yards, for fully two minutes, during which time I 

 had, short of actually holding it in my hands, the fullest possible oppor- 

 tunity of studying its form and markings, in many aspects. When it 

 finally dropped to the ground among the lower bushes and disappeared, 

 I had time to make only a short search for a possible nest, and was forced 

 to come away without even finding the bird again. Since then my father 

 and I have searched carefully the shore of the lake ; once later in the 

 summer of 1900, and twice in the summer of 1901 ; but we have seen no 

 further signs of Melospiza lincolnii. It is a species I know comparatively 

 well, both in the hand and at large, having grown very familiar with it 

 during the spring migration of 1900, and there is, for me, no possible 

 doubt that the Nubanusit Lake bird was an actual Lincoln's Sparrow. 



In a wood of tall mixed timber, at Chesham, N. H., six miles north of 

 Mt. Monadnock, on May iS, 1S99, my father watched for several minutes 

 at close range a female Black-backed Three-toed Woodpecker (Picoides 

 arciicus). The bird was feeding on a stump fifteen feet above his head, 

 and he had an excellent chance to examine it. Considering the lateness 

 of the season, this is a very southern record. 



On August 19, 1901, I saw at Dublin, N. H. (1500 feet above sea-level), 

 at the northern base of Mt. Monadnock, a Louisiana Water-Thrush 

 (Seinrtts motacilld). Early that morning, as I was lying ust awake in 

 my open tent among birch and poplar saplings, listening to the chip- 

 ping of many early migratory warblers, I heard near by an unusually loud 

 and ringing Water-Thrush call. The northern Water-Thrush (5". nove- 

 boracensis) is a common migrant here, and even breeds regularly in one 

 locality, and, though I was surprised by the loudness of the chip, I had 

 no thought of seeing anything but one of these birds. Sitting up in bed, 

 I began ' squeaking ' with my lips, and almost instantly the Water-Thrush 



