BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



157 



extending northward and westward to Little River and Smith's Pond, have been 

 the favorite haunts of the Snipe in the Cambridge Region. To these marshes 

 the birds have been pretty strictly confined during the last ten or fifteen years, 

 although they continue to be seen -more or less frequently, and at times rather 

 plentifully, at Rock Meadow, Belmont, and Great Meadow, East Lexington. 



During exceptionally wet autumns Snipe occasionally resort in large num- 

 bers to the highly cultivated truck farms of Arlington and Belmont. An inter- 

 esting instance of this happened in September, 1875, when a flight, larger than 

 any that I have known to occur in the Cambridge Region before or since, 

 settled in some water-soaked fields covered with crops of corn, potatoes, cab- 

 bages, etc., on the Hittinger farm, Belmont. Learning of the presence of these 

 birds, about a week after their arrival, I visited the place early the next morn- 

 ing, but all save ten or a dozen of them had departed, owing, no doubt, to the 

 fact that there had been a hard frost during the preceding night. The borings 

 and other signs which they had left convinced me, however, that the statement 

 made to me at the time by Mr. Jacob Hittinger, to the effect that he had started 

 four or five hundred Snipe there only the day before, was probably not an 

 exaggeration of the truth. 



When, on the other hand, there has been Uttle or no rain in late summer 

 and early autumn the Snipe, on returning from the north, sometimes find 

 their usual haunts too dry to serve as feeding grounds. At such times I have 

 often flushed birds from beds of rank grass or tall reeds about the shores of our 

 larger ponds and along the course of Alewife Brook ; I have also known them 

 to frequent the salt marshes bordering Charles River, and in the Longfellow 

 Marshes to even occur in numbers sufficient to furnish fairly good shooting. 



So far as I am aware Wilson's Snipe have never been found in summer 

 within the limits covered by the present Memoir. Upwards of thirty years ago 

 my friend, Mr. James C. Melvin, a sportsman of long and varied field experi- 

 ence, met with a brood of young during the first week of July in Carlisle, 

 Massachusetts. On nearly the same date of the following year he flushed 

 another brood in the same meadow. On both occasions he shot one or more 

 of the young, which were large enough to fly. I am told that Snipe have also 

 been seen in the river meadows just below Concord early in July. Mr. N. 

 A. Francis has reported ^ a supposed case of their breeding in Brookline, but as 

 the young birds which he found there were still in the nest, although "half- 

 grown," it is not probable that they were Wilson's Snipe. 



' N. A. Francis, Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, VIII, 1883, 243. 



