250 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



tion was established in the Fresh Pond Swamps in the spring of 1889. There 

 were only a few birds at first, but they continued to spread and increase until by 

 1898 there must have been upwards of two hundred of them. Since then the 

 number has fallen off considerably. Most of the Crackles frequenting this 

 locality build their nests in dense thickets of alders and other low bushes, some- 

 times not more than a foot or two above the ground or water ; others breed in 

 company with the Redwings in beds of cattail flags well out on the open marshes. 

 Within the past ten years I have found a few nests placed in button bushes 

 or among cattails growing in shallow water, at Great Meadow. This habit 

 of nesting in swamps and marshes is unquestionably of recent origin in our neigh- 

 borhood, for during the earlier years of my experience the birds seldom or never 

 resorted to very wet places excepting in autumn, when they used to assemble in 

 large numbers at evening in the maple woods bordering on Little River, where 

 they roosted in company with Robins and Cowbirds. 



Dr. Manning K. Rand tells me that a small colony of breeding Crackles 

 which I noticed last summer in the Public Carden, Boston, was started in 1901 

 by a single pair who built a nest in a thorn tree on the western side of the arti- 

 ficial pond, and reared their young successfully. 



The Bronzed Crackle has been seen in Cambridge early in December and 

 late in February, while, according to Mr. Shelley W. Denton, one or more birds 

 spent practically the entire winter of 1 887-1888 at Wellesley.^ 



[Megaquiscalus major (Vieill.). Boat-tailed Crackle. It has been assumed (although 

 the case does not seem to me clear) that Peabody had the Boat-tailed Grackle in mind when, 

 writing in 1839, he said that "the Black Oriole, ^uiscalus baritus, is seldom seen in this 

 vicinity," adding "one has been obtained by Mr. Samuel Cabot, jr. in the neighborhood of 

 Boston."^ In his earliest 'Catalogue of the Birds of Massachusetts,' published in 1864,^ Dr. 

 Allen includes the Boat-tailed Grackle as an "accidental" visitor, stating that he had "heard of 

 one [perhaps the Cabot bird] that was killed in Cambridge a few years since" and that "Mr. E. 

 A. Samuels tells me that a pair bred in Cambridge in 1861." Mr. Samuels in his ' Ornithology 

 of Massachusetts,' which also appeared in 1864, gives the bird as a rare "summer visitor,"* 

 but says nothing about its having bred in Cambridge. In his subsequent work on the birds 

 of New England, published in 1867,* he does not mention the species at all. Dr. Allen, however, 

 has referred to it again in the following terms :° "I now seriously question the occurrence of this 

 southern species in Massachusetts, or anywhere in New England, as even an accidental visitor. 



1 S. W. Denton, Ornithologist and Oologist, XIII, 1888, 104. 



2 W. B. O. Peabody, Storer and Peabody, Reports on the Fishes, Reptiles and Birds of Massa- 

 chusetts, 1839, 285. 



^ J. A. Allen, Proceedings of the Essex Institute, IV, no. iii, 1864, 85. 



* E. A. Samuels, Eleventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agri- 

 culture for 1863, 1864, Appendix, xxv. 



^E. A. Samuels, Ornithology and Oology of New England, 1867. 

 ° J. A. Allen, American Naturalist, III, 1870, 636. 



