1402 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 part 3 



A nest I found near Betchouane on June 24 was built on a dead 

 branch leaning against a spruce bush. Well hidden by overhanging 

 foliage, it was 2 feet from the ground, compactly built with many 

 twigs and chips of punky wood in the outer walls, and held three fresh 

 eggs. Two rather peculiar nests I found on Basque Island June 12, 

 1929, were in elbows of deformed white spruce trees 5 feet from the 

 ground. Both were slight affairs of twigs and dead grass wholly 

 embedded in the mass of twigs and spruce needles that had accumu- 

 lated in the hollows of the elbows, and were indistinguishable as nests 

 except from above. One contained two fresh eggs, the other three 

 partly incubated eggs. 



P. B. Philipp (1925) describes two distinct types of nests on the 

 Magdalens: "One, and that most commonly adopted, is on the 

 ground, either in a wet bog or on a dry hillside, under a thick mossy 

 spruce root or brush pile and usually in a very thick place. The other 

 situation is in a spruce bush, usually at a low elevation, though I have 

 seen nests fifteen feet from the ground. This latter type is, of course, 

 the easiest to find. The year 1923 was particularly favorable for 

 tracking down nesting pairs. It was a late, cold Spring, and even in 

 the first week in June the snow lay deep in the bogs and woods, and 

 this drove the birds off the ground and into the spruces * * *." He 

 describes a typical nest, presumably a bush nest, as having an outer 

 wall of spruce twigs and sphagnum moss with a considerable amount 

 of dead wood chips and coarse grass, and plentifully lined with cow 

 hair. 



Most of the nests William J. Brown (1911-1912) found in south- 

 western Newfoundland were in stunted spruces 2 to 8 feet from the 

 ground. One, however, was at the exceptional height of 20 feet from 

 the ground and held three large young on June 10. In 191 1 he found a 

 few nests on the ground, but in 1912 — a late season when snow con- 

 ditions made ground nesting impractical — all were in trees. Mosses 

 and rootlets were the principal materials used, with the addition of 

 spruce twigs in tree nests, and a lining of caribou hair. An unusual 

 nest wedged, creeper-fashion, between the loose bark and trunk of a 

 large pine, held the exceptional number of five young June 8, 1912. 



Although the species prefers conifers for nesting sites, it sometimes 

 uses deciduous trees. Harold S. Peters and Thomas D. Burleigh 

 (1951) describe a nest at Tompkins, Newfoundland, May 16, 1947 

 "built in a crotch of a lower limb in a large yellow birch, and about 

 seven feet above the ground. The deeply cupped nest was constructed 

 of shreds of bark, grasses and weed stems, and lined with fine black 

 rootlets." 



L. M. Tuck (MS.) says that all the nests he found in Newfoundland 

 were on the ground, and adds "perhaps it is easier to come across 



