258 CHADBOURNE oz a Flight of Killdeer Plover. [July 
decreased considerably of late years. They lay in several locali- 
ties and generally stay until early November,” and Mr. J. M. 
Southwick says ‘‘the species is not uncommon at Bristol, R. L., 
or was nota few years ago; not abundant ever, and perhaps 
rarer for the past four years.” Still anything like a fall flight of 
Killdeer in Massachusetts is a thing of the past and there is no 
recorded instance of such vast numbers as visited our coast in 
November, 1888. 
On the eastern side of Cape Cod, on Nantucket, and the Isles 
of Shoals, large numbers of Killdeer came in from the sea, some of 
them on November 25, but the majority on the morning of the 
26th. One of the market gunners said that ‘‘the whole island of 
Nantucket, both beach and upland, was covered with the birds” 
which occurred in loose straggling flocks. ‘There seemed to be 
no other species with them *; and though not fat, they were 
not in very poor condition. He had seldom known of this 
species on the island, and then in extremely small numbers. 
Along the eastern side of Cape Cod the Plover were as abundant 
as on Nantucket, and the conductors on the trains running from 
Provincetown to Boston reported that during and just after the big 
storm late in November, 1888, the whole country about Province- 
town was alive with Killdeer Plover, a bird that few of the gun- 
ners knew, while all along the beaches from Provincetown to 
Chatham large flocks were continually started up by the train. 
‘It seemed as if we were passing through one big flock of them 
all the way, and the fog made them afraid to go out to sea against 
the wind.’’ At the Isles of Shoals, Mrs. Celia Thaxter writes,f 
‘‘T was not at the Shoals when the birds appeared. All I know 
about them my brother tells me. It seems they appeared in large 
numbers, hundreds of them, in the midst of the great storm of 
November 25, feeding in the little valleys where the sea swept 
across the island. All sorts of strange things were cast up by the 
storm on these islands and the birds were busy devouring every- 
thing they could find, always running, chasing each other, very 
quarrelsome, fighting all the time. ‘They were in very poor con- 
dition, so lean that the men did not shoot them after the first day, 
a fact that gives your correspondent great satisfaction! They 
* ‘The only exceptions I know of areone Zofanus melanoleucus at Winthrop, Mass., 
and another at Marshfield; also a few Charadrius dominicus at Newport, R. I. 
t+ Through the kindness of Mr. Bradford Torrey I have been allowed to use Mrs, 
Thaxter’s letters to him about the Killdeer Plover. 
