A LABRADOR SPRING 
a kingbird we saw at Esquimaux Island. 
Now the kingbird is a very familiar and com- 
monplace bird in New England, but it rarely ex- 
tends its range to these boreal regions if we 
can judge by the fact that no one but Audubon 
had recorded it for southern Labrador before. 
But on the last day of this week, June roth, 
a day when my thermometer recorded the 
highest temperature at noon, 62° in the shade, 
although it was but 44° in morning and 48° 
at night, a day when I found the first bake- 
apple flower, — the shechootat of the Indians, — 
a burst of summer appeared in the form of 
delightful little flycatchers that at once took 
possession of all the alder thickets. The 
flycatcher family is a confusing one, and even 
the great Audubon was not infallible in this 
direction. For example, he says in his “ Birds 
of America” of the wood pewee: ‘‘ I have seen 
them in Labrador,” and on June 22, 1833, at 
American Harbour near Natashquan he says 
in his journal: “‘ I heard a wood pewee.’”’ Now 
the wood pewee is more southern in its range, 
and Audubon was ignorant of the existence 
of the yellow-bellied flycatcher, which was 
first named by Baird some ten years later, and 
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