DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS. 47 



becoming aware of their misfortune. In 

 the middle of December one of our Cam- 

 bridge ornithologists went to Cape Cod on 

 purpose to find them. He saw about sixty 

 birds, but by this time they were so wild 

 that he succeeded in getting only a single 

 specimen. "Poor fellows! " he wrote me; 

 "they looked unhappy enough, that cold 

 Friday, with the mercury at 12 and every- 

 thing frozen stiff. "Most of them were on 

 hillsides and in the hollows of pastures; a 

 few were in the salt marshes, and one or two 

 on the beach." Nobody expected them to 

 remain hereabouts, as they normally winter 

 in the West Indies and in Central and South 

 America; 1 but every little while Mrs. Thax- 

 ter wrote, "The killdeers are still here!" 

 and on the 21st of December, as I approached 

 Marblehead Neck, I saw a bird skimming 



1 It seems probable that the birds started from some 

 point in the Southern States for a long southward flight, 

 or perhaps for the West Indies, on the evening of Novem- 

 ber 24th, and on getting out to sea were caught by the 

 great gale, which whirled them northward over the At- 

 lantic, landing them such of them, that is, as were 

 not drowned on the way upon the coast of New Eng- 

 land. The grounds for such an opinion are set forth by 

 Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne in The Auk for July, 1889, 

 page 255. 



