234 MEMOIRS OF THE NtJTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



126. Otocoris alpestris praticola Hensh. 

 Prairie Horned Lark. 



Very rare transient visitor. 



On August 21, 1897, Mr. H. A. Purdie and I found a young Prairie Horned 

 Lark at Payson Park, Belmont. It was feeding, in company with a number of 

 Vesper and Chipping Sparrows, among some weeds which covered the surface 

 of a recently gravelled roadway. Approaching within a few yards of the bird, 

 we watched it for ten or fifteen minutes as it rambled about searching for 

 food. Every now and then it would stop and stand erect for an instant with 

 the feathers of the crown raised in a pointed crest. It was still in the spotted 

 first plumage, but the wings and tail were fully grown. The date on which it 

 was met with and the fact that it was evidently too young to have come from 

 any great distance afford practically conclusive evidence that it must have been a 

 Prairie Horned Lark. Were it not for these considerations I should not venture 

 to formally include praticola in the present Memoir on the strength of the evi- 

 dence just given, for although Mr. Purdie and I were perfectly siire of our identi- 

 fication of the bird seen at Payson Park we were unprovided, at the time, with 

 any means of securing the specimen. 



I know of no other instance of the occurrence of the Prairie Horned Lark 

 in the Cambridge Region, but the bird has been noted with increasing frequency 

 of late in other parts of eastern Massachusetts, to which it appears to be chiefly 

 a migratory visitor although its young in first plumage have been recently taken 

 in summer at Ipswich. It has been found nesting very commonly, if somewhat 

 locally, in many of the more open portions of Maine, New Hampshire and Ver- 

 mont, and also in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. There is a general impres- 

 sion that it has extended its breeding range into New England, from New York 

 and regions further to the westward, within the past twenty-five or thirty years. 

 I suspect, however, that it has been a summer resident of Massachusetts during 

 a somewhat longer period, for on July 5, 1869, I saw at Concord a pair of birds 

 which were certainly Horned Larks of some kind and which, in the light of our 

 present knowledge, it is fair to assume must have belonged to the form praticola. 

 They were flying about over some sandy fields admirably adapted for breeding 

 grounds and, indeed, closely similar to summer haunts of the Prairie Horned 

 Lark that I have visited in New York Start:e and elsewhere. 



