Some Southern New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts Notes. 
— The young bird student who has developed comparatively good observ- 
ing powers, but has as yet no reputation, is unfortunate if he is made sole 
witness to interesting bird happenings which cannot be authenticated. I 
cannot hope that the following will all be accepted as records; for, by 
singularly bad luck, the bird was not secured in any one of the more inter- 
esting cases; and I can only wish they had fallen to the lot of some 
trusted man. 
New Hampshire. 
On July 28, 1900, I saw on the shore of a small lake (Nubanusit Lake) 
in Hillsboro County, southwestern New Hampshire, just over the line 
from Cheshire County, a Lincoln’s Sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii ), whose 
actions seem to prove it a breeding bird. 
Nubanusit Lake, partly in Cheshire and partly in Hillsboro County, is 
a deepish sheet of clear water, of irregular form, being nearly three miles 
long and varying in width from less than a tenth of a mile to about a 
mile and a quarter. It lies at a height above the sea of 1368 feet, while 
some of the spruce-clad hills by which it is surrounded reach a height of 
nearly 2300 feet. 
The lake shore, which is now almost entirely wild, is here and there 
swampy and bush-grown, but mainly covered by a dense forest of fair- 
sized second-growth spruce trees ; while in a few places these have lately 
been cut, leaving brush-heaped and bramble-covered clearings, with small 
clumps of spruce saplings ; and these tracts are the breeding ground of 
many Song and White-throated Sparrows. The general aspect of the 
place is so northern, and its summer avifauna includes so many more or 
less strictly Canadian species, such as Swainson’s Thrushes, Olive-sided 
Flycatchers, Winter Wrens, Loons, Brown Creepers, Myrtle and Mag- 
nolia Warblers, etc., that one is tempted to the hope of finding some still 
more northern birds breeding there. 
As I was walking along the shore of this lake, at one of the cleared and 
scrubby points, without a gun, on the afternoon of July 28, 1900, a small 
sparrow, holding something in its bill, hopped onto a bush-top about four 
yards ahead of me, and fluttered from twig to twig, chirping anxiously. 
At first glance I saw that it looked wrong for a Song Sparrow, and at the 
second, as the bird flew to a still nearer bush, that it was an unmistakable, 
clearly marked Lincoln’s. Flying back and forth from one bit of scrub 
to another, with all the actions of a bird disturbed over an intruder’s near 
approach to its nest, it stayed in plain sight before me, at a distance vary- 
ing from three to six yards, for fully two minutes, during which time I 
had, short of actually holding it in my hands, the fullest possible oppor- 
tunity of studying its form and markings, in many aspects. When it 
finally dropped to the ground among the lower bushes and disappeared, 
I had time to make only a short search for a possible nest, and was forced 
to come away without even finding the bird again. Since then my fathei 
and I have searched carefully the shore of the lake ; once later in the 
summer of 1900, and twice in the summer of 1901 ; but we have seen no 
further signs of Melosfiza lincolnii. It is a species I know comparatively 
well, both in the hand and at large, having grown very familiar with it 
during the spring migration of 1900, and there is, for me, no possible 
doubt that the Nubanusit Lake bird was an actual Lincoln’s Sparrow. 
Auk, XIX, July, 1902, p p.Zjl.l.fS'. 
