406 NOTES ON THE 
ANTHUS SPRAGUEIL (AvpusBon). (700.) 
SPRAGUE’S PIPIT.* 
It has been a matter of question whether we could give this 
bird a just place amongst the bird fauna of this State, 
notwithstanding its occasional capture near the Red river, but 
it has been so often seen and carefully identified that all doubts 
are forever removed. 
While by no means to be accounted common summer residents, 
they are sufficiently numerous to be considered more than rare, 
in the northern portions of the State to the British Possesions. 
IT have found them more frequently in Pembina county than 
otherwheres, but only so, I think it is probable, because my 
opportunities have been greater to observe them there. In 
traversing those sections I have employed a buckboard which 
has made it possible to get a few specimens, and to observe a 
couple of nests which were occupied by the second brood, 
presumptively, as it was in June, and Mr. Lewis has since 
found them as early as April 23d in Clay county. 
Occasionally individuals have been secured in the lower belt 
of counties, yet no nests have been reported from that section. 
But I have had the pleasure of identifying Sprague’s Lark 
several times in the county in which I live, once within the 
territory since included in the limits of the city corporation, 
and breeding here as early as the 25th of March (1870). In 
June I had the repeated exceptional pleasure of hearing its — 
song while mounting to an altitude of not less than seven, and 
I think considerably more than eight hundred feet. The first 
time that this transpired I was riding in company with a friend, 
and on my way to collect birds, so that I was on the alert. I 
had an excellent field glass with me, and at the moment in my 
hand, as I saw the bird spring from the grass within a few 
feet of my horse, and a little: to the left of me. It flew a 
hundred feet away with a succession of flits of the wings, 
whieh lifted it about twenty feet into the air, when it turned 
and with the same movements of the wings, came indirectly 
towards me, rising another twenty feet, or thereabouts, when 
it again turned and began to sing with great enthusiasm, and 
thus back and forth, each time a little increasing the length of 
its zigzag undulations, it climbed upward, upward, upward, 
* When LI wrote the above account of this species. I did not know that Captain 
Blaikiston had observed it as early as May 4th, 1859, a fact which reached me at page 
176 of North American Birds. 
