THE AUK: 
A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF 
ORNITHOLOGY. 
vol. xviri. October, 1901. No. 4 
AN ORNITHOLOGICAL MYSTERY. 
BY WILLIAM BREWSTER. 
“Even yet thou art to me 
No bird : but an invisible Thing, 
A Voice, a mystery.” — Words-worth. 
In these days of multitudinous bird observers, when so many of 
the questions that both perplexed and stimulated the students of 
twenty-five or thirty years ago have been set finally at rest, it is 
refreshing to happen on an ornithological mystery ; one, more- 
over, possessing no slight interest and importance since it 
concerns a bird which is known to the ornithologists of eastern 
Massachusetts, as the Cuckoo was to Wordsworth, only by its 
voice. 
At about six o’clock on the afternoon of June 7, 1889, I heard 
in Cambridge, among the dense beds of cat-tail flags which sur- 
round I out Pond, some bird notes, rail-like in character but 
wholly new to me. They proved equally so to Mr. Walter Faxon 
and Mr. Bradford Torrey, whom I took to the place later that same 
evening. Together we listened to the bird for upward of an hour 
during which he was rarely silent for more than a minute or two at 
a time. As we were unable to obtain any clue to his identity, and 
as his song invariably began with a series of kick-kicks we chris- 
tened him the 1 Kicker ’ by which name he has since been known 
among the Cambridge ornithologists. 
