NORTHERN BLACK-THROATED BLUE WARBLER 227 



above the ground and were not very well concealed. They were well 

 made of strips of inner bark, canoe birch bark, straws, fern fronds, 

 and dry leaves, and were lined with black horsehair and fine black 

 rootlets. Altogether, Mrs. Harding (1931) found 15 nests similarly 

 placed in low mountain-laurels, from 9 to 15 inches up, and all made 

 of similar materials, but she says that "skunk fur is used freely as a 

 substitute and sometimes pine needles or bits of moss," in the lining. 

 So far as I know, she has not found pieces of rotten wood in the nests, 

 as commonly reported by others. 



Miss Cordelia J. Stanwood, of Ellsworth, Maine, tells me that the 

 nests she finds near her home are placed in small firs or spruces. Fred- 

 eric H. Kennard mentions in his notes a Maine nest wonderfully well 

 hidden in a clump of little spruces about one foot from the ground. 

 He also reports two Vermont nests, one about 2 feet from the ground 

 in a tangle of raspberry vines beside a logging road, the other about 

 8 or 10 inches up in a little thicket of low-growing mountain maple. 

 Robie TV. Tufts tells me that the few nests he has examined in Nova 

 Scotia were all built in "small spruce or fir seedlings two or three feet 

 from the ground in heavy woods of mixed or coniferous growth." 



Francis H. Allen writes to me of a nest he found in an unusual 

 situation in Waterville, N. H. : "It was placed about a foot from the 

 ground in the small twigs of a fallen beech, on which were the dead 

 leaves of last season. * * * x collected the nest July 3 after the 

 young had left it. The measurements were: Diameter, outside, 3% 

 inches ; inside, 2 inches ; depth, outside, 2^4 inches ; inside, 1% inches. 

 It was composed mainly of fragments and shreds of dead wood, 

 apparently stuck together by some glutinous substance, and in one 

 place it had what seemed to be a web of some kind binding it. A few 

 beech buds and bud scales were worked in, and a bleached leaf frag- 

 ment, a shred of yellow birchbark, and a small dangling strip of 

 canoe-birch paper — the last perhaps for ornament — completed the 

 body of the nest. The lining was of fine black rootlets. The general 

 effect of the outside was a light yellow or bright straw-color. It was 

 an interesting and a beautiful nest." 



Dr. Chapman (1907) says that "nests found by Burtch (MS.) at 

 Branchport, New York, were built in birch saplings eighteen and 

 twenty inches from the ground, and in a blackberry bush fourteen 

 inches from the ground." He quotes from the manuscript of Egbert 

 Bagg, of Utica, N. Y., who found nests very similar to the one de- 

 scribed above by F. H. Allen. But he says that "one nest had some of 

 the finer quills of our common procupine (even large enough for their 

 barbs to be visible to the naked eye). This sort of lining might be 

 satisfactory to the old bird, protected by her coat of feathers, but 

 would seem to be somewhat dangerous to her naked fledglings." One 



