.[14]

[14] Mr. William Brewster has been aware of this habit for twenty-five
years, but, like myself, has never seen it mentioned in print. He
devotes to it a paper in _The Auk_ for October, 1890, to which I am
happy to refer readers who may wish a more thorough discussion of the
matter than I have been able to give. My own paper was printed at the
same time, in _The Atlantic Monthly_, and had been accepted by the
editor before I knew of Mr. Brewster's intention to write. References to
a roost in Belmont, Mass., discovered by Mr. Brewster six years before,
are frequent in the following pages.

Toward the end of summer, two years ago, I saw what looked like a daily
passage back and forth of small companies of robins. A friend, living in
another town, had noticed similar occurrences, and more than once we
discussed the subject; agreeing that such movements were probably not
connected in any way with the grand southward migration, which, so far
as we could judge, had not yet commenced, but that the birds must be
flying to and from some nightly resort. The flocks were small, however,
and neither of us suspected the full significance of what we had seen.

On the 19th of July, 1889, the same friend informed me that one of our
Cambridge ornithologists had found a robin roost in that city,--a wood
in which great numbers of birds congregated every night. This led me to
keep a sharper eye upon my own robins, whom I had already noticed
repeating their previous year's manoeuvres. Every evening, shortly
before and after sunset, they were to be seen flying, now singly, now by
twos and threes, or even by the half dozen, evidently on their way to
some rendezvous. I was suspicious of a rather distant hill-top covered
with pine-trees; but before I could make it convenient to visit the
place at the proper hour, I discovered, quite unexpectedly, that the
roost was close by the very road up and down which I had been walking;
an isolated piece of swampy wood, a few acres in extent, mostly a dense
growth of gray birches and swamp white oaks, but with a sprinkling of
maples and other deciduous trees. It is bounded on the further side by a
wet meadow, and at the eastern end by a little ice-pond, with a
dwelling-house and other buildings beside it, all within a stone's throw
of the wood.

This discovery was made on the evening of July 25th, and I at once
crossed a narrow field between the wood and the highway, and pushed in
after the birds.