hat
owned it?" Then after some description of the plumage, she continued:
"In the late tremendous tempest myriads of these birds settled on the
Isles of Shoals, filling the air with a harsh, shrill, incessant cry,
and not to be driven away by guns or any of man's inhospitable
treatment. Their number was so great as to be amazing, and they had
never been seen before by any of the present inhabitants of the Shoals.
They are plovers of some kind, I should judge, but I do not know." On
the 16th she wrote again: "All sorts of strange things were cast up by
the storm, and the plovers were busy devouring everything they could
find; always running, chasing each other, very quarrelsome, fighting
all the time. They were in poor condition, so lean that the men did not
shoot them after the first day, a fact which gives your correspondent
great satisfaction. They are still there! My brother came from the
Shoals yesterday, and says that the place is alive with them, all the
seven islands."

Similar facts were reported--as I began in one way and another to
learn--from different points along the coast; especially from Cape
Elizabeth, Maine, where hundreds of the birds were seen on the 28th and
29th of November. The reporter of this item[4] pertinently adds: "Such a
flight of killdeer in Maine--where the bird is well known to be
rare--has probably not occurred before within the memory of living
sportsmen." Here, as at the Isles of Shoals, the visitors were at first
easily shot (they are not counted among game birds where they are known,
on account of their habitual leanness, I suppose); but they had landed
upon inhospitable shores, and were not long in becoming aware of their
misfortune. In the middle of December one of our Cambridge
ornithologists went to Cape Cod on purpose to find them. He saw about
sixty birds, but by this time they were so wild that he succeeded in
getting only a single specimen. "Poor fellows!" he wrote me; "they
looked unhappy enough, that cold Friday, with the mercury at 12 deg. and
everything frozen stiff. Most of them were on hillsides and in the
hollows of pastures; a few were in the salt marshes, and one or two on
the beach." Nobody expected them to remain hereabouts, as they normally
winter in the West Indies and in Central and South America;[5] but every
little while Mrs. Thaxter wrote, "The killdeers are still here!" and on
the 21st of December, as I approached Marblehead Neck, I saw a bird
skimming over