MASS. (Middlesex Co.) [Middlesex County, Massachusetts] Histrionicus torquatus
Scops Asio - breeding in Cambridge
1876.
Sunday
April 2 [April 2, 1876] Clear, warm & still, a lovely April day. Rose early
and took a walk up to Fresh Pond before
breakfast but saw nothing worthy of note.
Yesterday I received a magnificent adlt [adult]
[male] Histrionicus torquatus through the
kindness of Mr John Taylor of the steamer
New Brunswick. He purchased the bird
from one Cornell a taxidermist at
St. Johns N.B. [Saint John, New Brunswick] who in his turn bought it
of a gunner. It was shot in the Bay of
Fundy not far from the city. This forenoon
I skinned & mounted it as it was very
far gone having been shot nearly a
week. The flesh was dark like a coots.
The neck turned over the head though
with some difficulty: the sexual organs
were not much developed. This evening
the robins were singing gloriously from 
the tree tops in our neighborhood, the first
general chorus I have heard from
them this season. Birds have come along
very slowly during the past two weeks as
the weather has been for the most part
windy and chilly. Mr. Woodward a
student and a member of the N.O.C. [Nuttall Ornithological Club]
informed us last evening that he
had several times lately seen a pair
of Scopis Asio in an elm tree on Linnean St.
Cambridge opposite the Botanic garden,
and upon watching them he found that
they entered an old flickers hole in a rotten
limb: they have been seen by him a number
of times at, or a little after sunset & will
probably breed in this tree. Their
occurrence in so thickly settled a locality is most
interesting.