° 1918 J Wright, Labrador Chickadee in Migration. 39 



Mr. Mousley thus writes Dr. Townsend under date of May 28, 

 1917, "I have to-day heard from Ottawa that the three Labrador 

 Chickadees have turned out to be one male and two females, so 

 out of my six examples half are c? 's and half 9 's. I saw one 

 more example on Sunday the 27th by "itself." This fact of sex 

 equality in number leads Dr. Townsend to remark, "This would 

 look as if the birds were paired and travelling together. I found 

 the organs considerably enlarged." 



The definite determination of the subspecific type of hudsonicus, 

 taken at Hatley, P. Q., from the middle to the end of May, namely, 

 as Labrador (nigricans) , without variation, furnishes a fair basis 

 for the presumption that the birds seen about Boston earlier in May, 

 from the fourth to the eighteenth, were of the same subspecific 

 type, and, appearing after an interval of absence, were individuals 

 of the large fall migration of 1916 on their return flight north at 

 the time of the migratory flight of other northern nesting birds. 

 For such a succession of records of ' hudsonicus ' in May in this 

 region, I think, has never been paralleled in the past. When P. h. 

 littoralis has appeared, which has been quite infrequently, in the 

 passing years, so far as records show, only a bird or two had been 

 occasionally seen in the autumn until the migration of 1913, which 

 was unprecedented. 1 Whether that was essentially a migration of 

 P. h. littoralis or nigricans remains somewhat in doubt. Dr. 

 Townsend has identified the bird taken by Mr. J. L. Peters at 

 Harvard, Mass., on November 5, 1913, as a male of the nigricans 

 type, and on the other hand one of the nine or more Belmont birds, 

 taken on November 20, 1913, now in the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology, at Cambridge, as a female of the littoralis type. It was 

 assumed at the time my paper was written to be a flight of P. h. 

 littoralis, for the type P. h. nigricans had not then been established. 

 But Dr. Townsend has now rendered the service of determining 

 that the migration of 1916 was essentially that of P. h. nigricans. 

 Since there was no similar May migration in 1914, following the 

 large fall migration of ' hudsonicus' in 1913, the birds disappearing 

 by January or early February, may it be a fair assumption that the 

 birds of the 1913 migration were for the most part of the more 



1 Auk, vol. XXXI, April, 1914, p. 236. 



