_Spring._--The woodcock is the first of our waders to migrate north and one of the earliest of all our migrants, coming with the bluebirds and the robins, as soon as winter has begun to loosen its grip. The date depends on the weather and is very variable, for the bird must wait for a thaw to unlock its food supply in the bogs and spring holes. Walter H. Rich (1907) has known the woodcock to arrive in Maine as early as February 10, and says that early birds find a living about the big ant hills, until the alder covers are ready for them. In Audubon's (1840) time the migration must have been very heavy, for he says: At the time when the woodcocks are traveling from the south toward all parts of the United States, on their way to their breeding places, these birds, although they migrate singly, follow each other with such rapidity, that they may be said to arrive in flocks, the one coming directly in the wake of the other. This is particularly observable by a person standing on the eastern banks of the Mississippi or the Ohio, in the evening dusk, from the middle of March to that of April, when almost every instant there whizzes past him a woodcock, with a velocity equaling that of our swiftest birds. See them flying across and low over the broad stream; the sound produced by the action of their wings reaches your ear as they approach, and gradually dies away after they have passed and again entered the woods. No such flights can be seen to-day, but we occasionally have a comparatively heavy migration; such a flight occurred in 1923 and is thus described in some notes from Edward H. Forbush: The most remarkable occurrence of the past two months was the prevalence of migrating woodcocks over a large part of southern New England and along the coastal regions to Nova Scotia. The first woodcock was reported in Massachusetts the last week in February and from the first week in March onward woodcocks were noted in slowly increasing numbers over a large part of New England. From March 22 to the first week in April the number of these birds scattered through Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts was remarkable. At evening one could find them almost anywhere. They were seen in the most unlikely places even in daylight. They were in all the towns around Boston and in the suburbs of the city itself, and west at least to the Connecticut Valley they were even more numerous in the woods and swamps. In southern New England at this time a large part of the snow had gone and in going had thawed the ground so that no frost remained and the woodcocks could find earthworms almost everywhere. Farther north there was not only frost in the ground but there was deep snow and the birds could find no food.