6 T Ibe. AU: D'U B.OIN BLU La 
published in the September, 1949 issue of THE AUDUBON BULLETIN. 
It was illustrated with a drawing by Richard Zusi, then a high-school boy 
and the joy of the Evanston Bird Club, and now Associate Curator of 
Shore Birds at the Smithsonian Institution. 
The tern was observed over a period of ten days by every active birder 
in the area. Seven of us spent a morning in the Field Museum examining 
skins, with the result that we even pinned down the subspecies — Phaetusa 
simplex chloropoda. The bird lives on sandy banks of deep rivers along 
the coasts of Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. Phone calls to the 
zoos in our area failed to uncover any missing birds. This is the only record 
of a Large-billed Tern in North America, as far as we could determine. 
We were even willing to sacrifice our darling to any museum that would 
come out to Lake Calumet and “collect” it, but no one volunteered to do so. 
Among my “write-ins” are several accidentals recorded in the Ford 
bulletin. One was the Swallow-tailed Kite which several C.O.S. members 
saw in June, 1948, at the Indiana Dunes. I had just returned from a Na- 
tional Audubon Society field trip to Florida, where I saw many of the 
kites. I thought that I was having hallucinations when the lone bird floated 
cver my head. It was-a great relief to hear others in the group shouting 
in wild excitement. 
The Ford Bulletin’s only Chicago record of a Lark Bunting is on my 
list. I was with Ellen Stephenson and Richard Zusi when they identified 
the bird, a female, at Lake Calumet in September, 1949. They had just 
returned from a trip to Colorado, where they had become familiar with 
the species. 
But what happened to our record of the Hudsonian Boreal Chickadee, 
Giscovered by Mrs. Russell Mannette in Gillson Park, Wilmette, in Novem- 
ber, 1951? The last record in Ford’s booklet was for November, 1906. The 
only record of a Varied Thrush in Ford is that of a bird seen in 1929 at 
Blue Island by Karl Bartel. There was a Varied Thrush in an Evanston 
yard in January, 1950, and I also have records for January, 1951, and 
January, 1956. A Townsend’s Solitaire was “taken” in Lake County, Illinois 
in 1875, according to Ford, and there is no other record. I saw one on 
January 3, 1954. My careless notes failed to specify where it was seen, but 
I believe Theodore Nork, Charles Clark, and Albert Campbell found it in 
Morton Arboretum. 
Some birds are seen frequently enough to be added to the field cards. 
The beautiful Harlequin Duck is a rarity of rather frequent occurrence. 
The last one I saw, an adult male, was in Waukegan Harbor, February, 1964. 
White-fronted Geese are seen almost every year—at Willow Slough and 
Jasper-Pulaski state game reserves in Indiana, Baker Lake on the edge 
of Barrington, Ill., and other places. The ruff has appeared several times 
in the past twenty years. An adult bird with a conspicuous ruff was re- 
ported at Lake Calumet in the summer of 1967, but I did not see it. 
Off-hand, I can think of many birds seen by others, but not by me, to 
aad to the list. There is the Hawk Owl that James Landing observed one 
recent Sunday in January. Birders raced from all directions when the 
grape-vine telephone calls spread out. By the time we arrived, dense fog 
had blotted out the ice floe on which the bird had perched all morning. 
I remember the Burrowing Owl seen by Ellen Stephenson, Ted Nork and 
others in Lincoln Park after a violent spring storm. Swainson’s and Ferru- 
