Every bird season has peculiarities of its own, in Franconia as elsewhere. This fall, for example, there were no crossbills, even at Lonesome Lake, where we have commonly found both species. White-crowned sparrows were rare; perhaps we were a little too early for the main flight. We saw one bird on September 23, and two on the 26th. Another noticeable thing was a surprising scarcity of red-bellied nuthatches. We spoke often of the great contrast in this respect between the present season and that of three years ago. Then all the woods, both here and at Moosilauke, fairly swarmed with these birds, till it seemed as if all the Canadian nuthatches of North America were holding a White Mountain congress. The air was full of their nasal calls. Now we could travel all day without hearing so much as a syllable. The tide, for some reason, had set in another direction, and Franconia was so much the poorer. AMERICAN SKYLARKS “Right hard it was for wight which did it heare, To read what manner musicke that mote bee.” SPENSER. On the second day after our arrival in Franconia[11] we were following a dry, sandy stretch of valley road--on one of our favorite rounds--when a bird flew across it, just before us, and dropped into the barren, closely cropped cattle pasture on our left. Something indefinable in its manner or appearance excited my suspicions, and I stole up to the fence and looked over. The bird was a horned lark, the first one that I had ever set eyes on in the nesting season. He seemed to be very hungry, snapping up insects with the greatest avidity, and was not in the least disturbed by our somewhat eager attentions. It was plain at the first glance that he was of the Western variety,--a prairie horned lark, in other words,--for even in the best of lights the throat and sides of the head were white, or whitish, with no perceptible tinge of yellow. The prairie lark is one of the birds that appear to be shifting or extending their breeding range. It was first described as a sub-species in 1884, and has since been found to be a summer resident of northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and, in smaller numbers, of western Massachusetts. It is not impossible, expansion being the order of the day, that some of us may live long enough to see it take up its abode within sight of the gilded State House dome. My own previous acquaintance with it had been confined to the sight of a few migrants along the seashore in the autumn, although my companion on the present trip had seen it once about a certain upland farm here in Franconia. That was ten years ago, and we have again and again sought it there since, without avail.