INTRODUCTION. 



The birds of the Cambridge Region have been studied longer and more 

 continuously, as well as perhaps more carefully, than those of any other locality 

 of similar extent in all America. As far back as 1832 they were intimately 

 known to Nuttall, and during the following eight or ten years they became 

 equally so to Samuel Cabot and his brother, J. Elliot Cabot. Henry Bryant 

 is also said to have been rather deeply interested in them about this time and 

 to have collected them in considerable numbers.^ Between 1842 and i860 

 they received more or less attention from James Russell Lowell, Thomas M. 

 Brewer, Wilson Flagg, and various successive members of the Harvard Natural 

 History Society, while from 1861 or 1862 to the present day they have been 

 constantly under the observation of an ever increasing number of ornithol- 

 ogists. Thus we have knowledge of them extending back over a practically 

 unbroken period of more than seventy years. This, although by no means com- 

 plete at all points, is sufficient to enable us to trace some of the more important 

 and interesting changes in the local distribution and abundance of many of the 

 species — especially the larger ones — which have taken place during the period 

 just indicated. Some of these changes have evidently resulted from the increase 

 of human population and the various modifications in the physical character of the 

 region wrought by the hand of man ; others have apparently been due to the 

 introduction and subsequent increase of the pernicious House Sparrows ; still 

 others have been brought about by influences not as yet fully understood. The 

 published notes and records, although by no means unimportant, are compara- 

 tively meager and rather widely scattered, for no book or paper dealing exclu- 

 sively as well as extensively with the avifauna of the region has hitherto 

 appeared. The manuscript matter, however, is exceptionally rich and valuable, 



' Henry Bryant was a classmate of J. Elliot Cabot's at Harvard College and was graduated with 

 him in 1840. Cabot, in his autobiography ( J. EUiot Cabot [Autobiographical sketch], 1904) refers 

 to Bryant in terms which indicate that the latter, during his college days, devoted much of his time 

 to collecting birds in the immediate neighborhood of Cambridge. 



