186 NOTES ON THE 
SPECIFIC CHARACTERS. 
Bill rather longer than the head, straight, slender, com- 
pressed; wing long, pointed; tail short; legs, lower half of the 
tibia naked; toes moderate, slender, margined, the outer and 
middle united at the base; rump and upper tail coverts white, 
the latter transversely barred with ashy-brown; the other 
upper parts ashy, many feathers having large arrowheads and 
irregular spots of brownish-black, and edged with ashy-white; 
under parts white, with numerous longitudinal lines on the 
neck before, and arrowheads on the sides of dark ashy-brown; 
axillaries and under wing coverts white, with bands of ashy- 
brown, very indistinct in many specimens, but generally well 
defined; quills brownish-black; tail ashy white with transverse 
bands of dark-brown, middle feathers darker; bill greenish- 
black; legs yellow; iris dark-brown. 
Length, 10 to 11; wing, 6 to 6.50; tail, 2.50; bill, 1.50; tarsus, 2. 
Habitat, America in general. 
TOTANUS SOLITARIUS (Witson). (256.) 
SOLITARY SANDPIPER. 
This little shorebird reaches us as late as the 10th of May; 
rarely earlier, and always in pairs. They are at once found 
running along the shores of ponds, lakes and streams, with 
very little regard to solitude, as the din of all the vast flouring 
and saw mills, with trains of cars passing on an average of 
every ten minutes, to which vastly more confusion should be 
added, does not in the least disturb them. Their food consists 
of aquatic insects and their larvae, with minute mollusca enter- 
ing in to vary the variety. In ashort time, or about the 25th 
of May, they principally disappear, evidently to nest and rear 
their young, for only a few are seen, and then in unmistakable 
solitude. This continues until early in August, when tkey 
begin to seek the former localities in family parties of from six 
to eight. As the summer passes into autumn, these families 
become winged communities of thirty, forty, or more, which 
increase in size to some extent until they leave, about the first 
of October. They are universally distributed over the entire 
State. 
I have several times had the eggs of this species brought to 
me, with all but positive assurance that the identification was 
correct, and I hear of others in the possession of amateur 
odlogists, reputedly collected locally, but in the case of the 
former, the eggs have either been those of the Spotted Sand- 
pipers, of which I have a full supply of my own collection, or 
