NORTHERN PRAIRIE WARBLER 431 



feet about the ground, and could be seen only by parting the bushes. 

 Other nests were found where woods had been cut off or burned over 

 and a low growth of deciduous saplings had sprung up, mixed with 

 tangles of blackberries and sweet fern. One nest was only 20 inches 

 from the ground, well-hidden in a thick clump of sweet fern ; others 

 were in oak, poplar, wild apple, or cherry, or maple saplings, seldom 

 over 3 or 4 feet above the ground, and often plainly visible. On the 

 pine barrens of Cape Cod we find the nests in the leafy tops of the 

 scrub oaks, and at similar heights among the pines. 



Of the nests found by Dr. Coues (1888) near Washington, D. C, 

 one was about 2^^ feet up in a triple prong of a low laurel bush ; an- 

 other was 5 feet from the ground in a blackberry bramble, "made al- 

 most entirely of dandelion down, closely felted, and further secured 

 with a few straws, and is stuccoed over outside with small dry leaves. 

 The inside is copiously lined with red cowhair, making a marked 

 color contrast with the other materials." A third was placed in a very 

 young pine, about li/^ feet from the ground and against the main stem. 

 Another was in an unusual situation, in a mass of grapevine twigs, 

 about three feet from the ground. 



Harold H. Bailey (1913) says that, in Virginia, "the earliness or 

 lateness of the season has much to do with the location of their nests. 

 Late springs, when the foliage is retarded and little shelter or protec- 

 tion is given the nest, it is invariably placed in a clump of holly scrub, 

 or wax myrtle, whose foliage remains green throughout the entire 

 winter. Sometimes I have found them in a small sapling cedar, 

 placed near the trunk and ten feet from the ground, other times equally 

 as high or higher, on a horizontal limb of a tree on the edge of a 

 clearing." 



T, E. McMullen has sent me the data for 14 nests found in New 

 Jersey, 11 of which were in hollies in large woods. Richard C. 

 Harlow tells me that on the coast of Virginia the prairie warbler 

 nests commonly at heights of 10 or 15 feet in pines ; he found one oc- 

 cupied nest 25 feet up and 10 feet out near the end of a horizontal pine 

 limb. In North Carolina, according to Pearson and the Brimleys 

 (1919), this warbler "seams to prefer sweet-gum saplings as nesting 

 trees near Raleigh, nine out of seventeen nests examined by C. S. 

 Brimley having been thus situated. Two were in elms, two in huckle- 

 berries, and one each was found in pine, sumac, black haw and Ilex 

 deciduay All the Ontario nests referred to in notes from Dr. Starr 

 and Dr. Harrington were in clumps of low junipers, 1 to 3 feet above 

 the ground. 



Edward R. Ford writes to me: "One of the few localities in the 

 Chicago region in which it nests does not seem to be well selected. On 

 the sunny, wind-swept shore dunes of Lake Michigan, in Porter 



