VOl l909 :VI ] General Notes. 429 



with mild anxiety. But throughout my stay near her she did not move 

 ten feet from the spot where I first saw her. 



On July 18, 1909, about a quarter of a mile below the timber line, I 

 found a female Spruce Partridge lying in the same path. When I had 

 approached within a distance of about twenty feet, she raised herself 

 slightly and four young, looking like average domestic chicks on the day 

 of their hatching, ran out into the path. To my surprise they soon took 

 flight, and with very rapid wing strokes and with dangling legs they quickly 

 disappeared amongst the trees. The mother bird was more agitated than 

 the one I had seen the year before, but showed none of the excitement so 

 familiar in the mother Ruffed Grouse. I repeatedly stroked her back with 

 my umbrella, and she seemed absolutely indifferent to this treatment. 



Since the Crawford bridle path is one of the most frequented of the White 

 Mountain trails and is travelled every season by hundreds of tourists 

 many of whom camp and too many of whom are ruthless destroyers of 

 wild life, it is remarkable that the Spruce Partridge retains its racial 

 tameness in this region and, indeed, that it survives near the path at all. 

 — Nathan Clifford Brown, Portland, Maine. 



The Passenger Pigeon — Only One Pair Left. — Still clinging to my 

 belief that the Passenger Pigeon will never again be seen in its wild state, 

 I have felt a special interest in the remaining birds belonging to the Mil- 

 waukee and Cincinnati flocks which have been in confinement for many 

 years. In my last remarks on this species (Auk, Vol. XXV, 190S, p. 18) 

 I stated that the remnants of these flocks then numbered but seven birds 

 (6 (5\ 1 9 ) , with little or no chance of further reproduction. This number 

 is now reduced to a single pair, and doubtless the months are numbered 

 when this noble bird must be recorded as extinct. 



Under date of August 9, 1909, Mr. A. E. Wiedring, who has had charge 

 of the Milwaukee birds, writes that the remaining four males, which I 

 saw in 1907, died between November, 1908, and February, 1909, and that 

 he attributed the cause to tuberculosis. The specimens were not pre- 

 served, they being in very poor plumage and apparently going through a 

 belated moult. 



On July 29, 1909, Mr. S. A. Stephen, General Manager of the Cincinnati 

 Zoological Company, wrote me that one of the two old males in the Gardens 

 died in April, 1909, leaving one male, about twenty-four years old, and the 

 female which came from Prof. Charles O. Whitman's flock in 1902, and now 

 about thirteen years old, and unquestionably infertile. Mr. Stephen 

 thought that the bird died simply of old age, there being no apparent signs 

 of disease. The specimen was moulting and in too poor a condition to be 

 saved. — Ruthven Deane, Chicago, III. 



The Black Gyrfalcon in Connecticut. — A fine female Falco rusticolus 

 obsoletus was shot at Durham, Conn., Jan. 27, 1907, and sent to me and is 



