The redbacks do not reach the Massachusetts coast in any numbers until the last week in September and the main flight comes in October, with some lingering into November and a few remain all winter occasionally. While with us they frequent the ocean beaches and salt-water mud flats, where they associate with sanderlings, ringnecks, peep, and turnstones. During high tides they rest on the high, sandy beaches in the large flocks of other small waders. They fly in close flocks, low over the water. The adults which come first, have nearly completed the body molt when they arrive here. _Winter._--It is only a short flight farther to their winter homes on our southern coast. Dr. Louis B. Bishop (1901) found this to be "the most abundant sandpiper" on Pea Island, North Carolina, in winter. Arthur T. Wayne (1910) says that it usually arrives in South Carolina about the first week in October and remains until May 25. "With the exception of the western sandpiper, this species is the most common of all the waders that winter on the coast. It is a very hardy bird and is apparently not inconvenienced by a temperature of 6° above zero." We found it common all winter on the coastal islands and mud flats on the west coast of Florida. Mr. Nichols says in his notes: Where met with on its winter range in northwest Florida it apparently shifted its feeding grounds with high or low water, at the particular locality in mind, more or less dependent on the wind. When offshore winds caused low tides and extensive mud flats, it was less numerous; when the water was high, numbers were seen flying over the bay. They were present on inundated landward flats, and, as the tide receded, fed along the edge of the bay near by, wading in the water and often immersing most of the head as they probed. According to J. Hooper Bowles (1918) they winter farther north on the Pacific coast than on this side. He writes: These birds are among the last of the Limicolae to arrive in the fall migration, often reaching Washington after many of the other species have left for the South. They make up for it, however, by staying with us all winter and late into the spring. On the Nisqually Flats I have seen them in flocks of hundreds when the marsh was a solid pack of snow and ice, the rise and fall of the tide making sufficient feeding grounds to keep them fat and strong. DISTRIBUTION _Range._--North America and eastern Asia; casual in Central America and the West Indies.