^ o , o Auk,, XIV. July, 1807, £>?• 3X -°' / ' 
The Seaside Sparrow yAmmodramus mciritimus ) in Massachusetts. — 
In a small private collection of mounted birds in Arlington, Mass., I find 
an adult Seaside Sparrow with the following history : shot by Mr. 
Eugene H. Freeman on the bank of the Neponset River, at high tide, 
about half way between Milton Lower Mills and Granite Bridge, on the 
Milton side of the river. Unfortunately the date of capture is not 
recorded ; it was in the early autumn, however, something over twenty 
years ago, so Mr. Freeman tells me. 
In most of the older lists of the birds of Massachusetts the Seaside 
Sparrow is said to be a common summer resident of the salt marshes 
along the coast. This opinion doubtless arose from confounding the 
Seaside Sparrow with the Sharp-tailed Sparrow ( Ammodramus cauda- 
cutus ). That such a confusion prevailed is shown by the fact that many 
of the old lists (e.g., Emmons’s ‘ Birds of Mass.,’ Holder’s ‘ Birds of Lynn,’ 
and Putnam’s ‘Birds of Essex Co.’) exclude A. cciudacutus altogether! 
Even Dr. Coues (Proc. Essex Inst., V, 1868, 282), by a lapsus corrected 
in ‘New England Bird Life,’ I, 251, recorded the Sharp-tails of Rye 
Beach, N. II., as Seaside Sparrows, and J. Matthew Jones (‘Forest and 
Stream,’ XII, 1879, 106) in his list of the birds of Nova Scotia included 
the Seaside Sparrow as an abundant summer resident of that Province, 
arriving there during the latter part of March ! From what is now known 
concerning the breeding range of A. mciritimus , we are warranted in 
suspecting that Brewer (Hist. N. A. Birds, I, 1874, 560), too > fell Into a 
similar error in saying that a few pairs of Seaside Sparrows, “ identified 
by Mr. Audubon,” bred in the marshes of Stony Brook, near Boston, in 
1836 and 1837. 
However that may be, the eastern limit of the breeding range of the 
Seaside Sparrow, so far as now observed, is the western shore of Nar- 
ragansett Bay, beyond which it occurs only as a very rare straggler. The 
first unquestionable Massachusetts specimen was killed at Nahant in 
August, 1877, by Geo. O. Welch, and recorded by Brewer (Bull. Nuttall 
Orn. Club, III, 1878,48; Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., XIX, 1878, 260). 
This specimen (now in the collection of the Boston Society of Natural 
History, No. 221) is a young male with a sharply streaked breast; it was 
identified by Baird as a Seaside Sparrow “ in the plumage regarded by 
Audubon as a distinct species, and called by him MacGillivray’s Finch.” 
Another Massachusetts specimen, an adult female shot by Dr. L. B. 
Bishop on Monomoy Island, Cape Cod, April 14, 1890, was recorded by 
J. C. Cahoon in ‘The Auk,’ VII, 1890, 289. — Walter Faxon, Museum 
of Comparative Zoology , Cambridge, Mass. 
The Seaside Sparrow on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in Winter.— On 
December 29 , 1909 , while duck shooting in the salt marshes at Barnstable, 
Mass., I secured two specimens of the Seaside Sparrow ( Ammodramus 
maritimus) . The birds were found in the tall thatch bordering a large 
creek about three hundred yards from Sandy Neck. They were the only 
birds of the species seen during four days spent in the marshes. One 
proved to be a male, the other a female. 
Howe and Allen’s ‘Birds of Massachusetts’ records the capture of one 
Seaside Sparrow in the Barnstable marshes on February 9 , 1898 , by Messrs. 
H. B. Bigelow and G. C. Shattuck, and of another, a male, on February 9 , 
1901 , by Mr. Howe. No later records have come to my notice, so appar- 
ently mine is the third winter record of this species in Massachusetts and 
would suggest that the bird is perhaps not such an irregular straggler there 
in winter. — Alfjred C. Redfield, Wayne, Pa. 
Ank 97 . Apr-l»l0 p. *.// 
190 
