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ALLEN, The Little Black Fail. 3 
young, which I herewith send you. Many more can be caught. 
“I have seen them in our meadow every month of the year, but 
they never make a great noise except when very fat on the wild 
oat’s seed. From the above you will conclude that they do not 
migrate to the south [=north?], but breed here.” From Mr. 
Peale’s letter we learn that the old bird was found, on dissection, 
to have been “a male, rendering it singularly curious that e 
should have suffered himself to be captured by hand while in 
defence of the young brood.”” We also learn that the young died 
soon after Mr. Peale received them, but that ‘“‘the old one lived 
.... until the 26th of July (four days after its capture), evincing 
considerable anxiety for the young, as long as they lived.”’ 
Mr. Peale also says: ‘‘ There is now in the Museum [probably 
Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia] a specimen of this species, 
which has been in the collection for about thirty years, said to 
have been caught in the vicinity of this city.” This is doubtless 
a record of the earliest known capture of this species in the 
United States. Mr. Audubon adds: “Since the above was 
written, I have received a letter from J. Trudeau, M. D., in 
which he says that his father shot a considerable number of 
these Rails last winter [probably 1836-37] in the vicinity of 
New Orleans.” 
For our next news of this bird we must apparently return to 
Jamaica. Eighty-seven years after Browne’s original discovery 
of the species, Mr. Philip Henry Gosse, in his ‘ Birds of Jamaica’ 
(1847, p. 375), says: ‘A specimen of this little Crake [he calls 
it the Little Red-eyed Crake] was brought to mein April, alive 
and unhurt. It lived ina cage two days, but though I enclosed 
with it a vessel containing water and mud, with aquatic weeds in 
a growing state, and scattered on it crumbs of bread and pounded 
corn, it scarcely ate.” He describes its manner of walking and 
its pose, as observed in confinement, and then says: ‘On two 
or three occasions, I have seen the species. Near the end of 
August, pursuing a White Gaulin [or White Heron] in the mo- 
rasses of Sweet River, several of these little Rails, one at a time, 
flew out from the low rushes before my feet, and fluttering along 
for a few yards, with a very laboured flight, dropped in the dense 
rush again. Their manner of flight, and their figure greatly resem- 
