A Chipping Sparrow in late December at Boston, Mass. — On December 
21, 1909, close to the shore of Chestnut Hill Reservoir within the limits of 
the city I found a brightly plumaged Chipping Sparrow ( Spizella passerina) 
picking busily and happily on the grass about some evergreens at midday. 
The temperature was at the frost point, but no snowfalls to remain had 
occurred up to that time. There had been several mornings of tempera- 
tures as low as 16° to 20°, however. I would naturally have expected the 
sparrow to be a Tree Sparrow, but it was a veritable Chippy, with which I 
spent ten minutes. Mr. William Brewster, in his 1 Birds of the Cambridge 
Region, ’^jives one December record, that of a bird seen by him at Water- 
town on December 31, 1869. The severe Christmas blizzard came four 
days later, depositing a foot and a half of snow, and this belated sparrow 
was not again seen. Mr. Brewster gives October 25 as the date of depar- 
ture of the last Chippies; Dr. Townsend for Essex County, October 28. 
My records in the last three years extend the season somewhat later. 
They are: two Chipping Sparrows on the Common on October 30, 1907 and 
1909; one on November 1, 1907, at Arlington, two on. the 5th at Waverley, 
five on the 6th in Brookline, two on the 9th in Stoneham; one on October 
29, 1908, at Chestnut Hill; a company of ten on November 5 and 7 of the 
same year at Stoneham; and one at the same locality in Stoneham on 
November 6, 1909. — Horace W. Wright, Boston, Mass. 
Auk 47,*ar-i bio p. . 
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