BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



149 



logical Mystery '1 that it seems unnecessary, in the present connection, to give more than a 

 brief recapitulation of the essential facts connected with the case, which are as follows : — 



At about six o'clock on the afternoon of June 7, 1889, I heard, among the dense beds of cat- 

 tail flags at Pout Pond, some bird notes which were wholly new to me. They proved equally so 

 to Mr. Walter Faxon and Mr. Bradford Torrey whom I took to the place later that same evening. 

 As we were unable at the time to obtain any clue to the identity of the author of these sounds, 

 and as his song regularly began with a series of ' kick-kicks^ we christened him the ' Kicker,' by 

 which name he has since been known to Cambridge ornithologists. 



In the course of the following fortnight two more birds of the same kind were heard in the 

 large marsh directly north of the Glacialis, one at Rock Meadow, one about half-way between 

 the Waverley Oaks and the Clematis Brook station of the Fitchburg Railroad, and one at the 

 reservoir in East Lexington, while three were noted in the Neponset River meadows near Read- 

 ville, one on the banks of the Sudbury River just above Concord, andy?t»« in a meadow near the 

 mouth of West Brook in Sudbury. All of the«e birds were evidently settled for the season and 

 no doubt breeding, for such of them as we were able to keep under close observation continued 

 to be heard at their respective stations nearly or quite to the end of June. Although Mr. Faxon 

 and I spared no pains to ascertain what they were, we were wholly unsuccessful, at least during 

 that season. 



So far as we know, the mysterious birds have not since returned to any of the meadows in 

 or near Cambridge, but I noted one at Falmouth, Massachusetts, on June 25, 1890, and in the 

 extensive marshes opposite my camp on Concord River, about two miles below the town center 

 of Concord, one was singing in the evening of June 22, 1892, and another nearly every evening 

 from May 18 to June 12, 1898 ; while I heard at least three and I think four different ' Kickers ' in 

 these meadows during the last week of June, 1901. Most of the birds just mentioned were in 

 very wet fresh-water meadows or swamps, either among luxuriant wild grasses or in beds of tall 

 rushes or of cattail flags. In short their haunts were similar to those of the Carolina and Virginia 

 Rails, and their periods of greatest activity appeared to be to an even larger degree nocturnal, for 

 we seldom heard them by day and, as a rule, they did not begin calling regularly until after sun- 

 set while they kept it up the greater part of the night. 



Their voices, also, were unmistakably Rail-like. What we took to be the song, since it 

 was uttered almost unceasingly, at short regular intervals, for hours at a time, consisted of a 

 series of notes which may be written thus : kic-kic-kic, ki-kieer. The kic-kic notes were very like 

 those which the Virginia Rail sometimes produces, but the terminal kieer (or quier") was wholly 

 unique and characteristic. 



The Rail-like character of the habits, haunts and notes of the ' Kicker' led us to suspect, 

 from the first, that the bird was some kind of Rail. Among the Rails known or likely to occur 

 in summer in the fresh-water marshes of southern New England, the only species with which 

 our local ornithologists are not familiar are the King and Black Rails. Judging from descrip- 

 tions the notes of the King Rail are very different from those of the ' Kicker,' but the latter's 

 kic-kic-kic, ki-kieer is apparently not unlike the "chi cki-cro-croo-croo" which Mr. March suggests^ 

 as a rendering ot the call of the Black Rail which inhabits Jamaica and which is believed by 

 ornithologists to be identical with the bird that breeds in the eastern United States. These con- 

 siderations, taken in connection with the fact that in the little meadow at Falmouth where I 

 heard the ' Kicker ' singing on the evening of June 25, 1 found, next morning, a nest closely 

 resembling that of the Black Rail, have led me to conclude that the mysterious ' Kicker ' is prob- 

 ably Porzana jamaicensis. The question cannot be regarded as settled, however, until some one 

 is fortunate enough either to shoot or to obtain a good view of the bird while it is in the act of 

 uttering its peculiar notes.] 



' W. Brewster, Auk, XVIII, 1901, 321-328. 



2 W. T. March, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1864, 69. 



