Excerpt, page 3: “Discovered among the sand-hills of Ipswich, Massachusetts, by Mr. C.J. Maynard, and the single specimen obtained by him December 4, 1868, wrongly identified as Baird’s Sparrow of the far West by no less eminent an authority than Professor S.F. Baird, the Ipswich Sparrow, for a long time after it was recognized as a new species, enjoyed a reputation for rarity which later observations have not sustained. Gradually the few energetic collectors who have cared to face the wintry winds that sweep the desolate stretches of low sand-hills fringing so much of our Atlantic coast, have proved the bird to be a regular migrant or winter visitor, found more or less abundantly from Maine to Georgia. For nearly sixteen years after its discovery there was no clue to its breeding haunts until, in 1884, a single summer specimen was obtained from Sable Island, Nova Scotia.” … “Lying as it does far out in the ocean, nearly one hundred miles from the Nova Scotia coast, a landing upon it impracticable except in fine weather, and wrapped in impenetrable fog for weeks at a time, small wonder is it that this lonely sand-bank should have guarded its secrets for so many years. Now at last it has yielded them up, and the home life of the Ipswich Sparrow, its unknown song, its undiscovered nest and eggs, its undescribed fledgling plumage, are no longer matters of conjecture. It is my pleasant task in these pages to lay them before my readers, with some other new facts that came to my notice while exiled on the narrow strip of sand known as Sable Island.”
