BEWICK'S WREN 177 



quenting open woodlands, upland thickets and hills, fence rows near 

 houses, and orchards, where it is often seen perched on telephone wires 

 or even the roofs of houses and farm buildings, pouring out its de- 

 lightful song. Ridgway (1889) says: "No bird more deserves the 

 protection of man than Bewick's Wren. He does not need man's en- 

 couragement, for he comes of his own accord and installs himself as 

 a member of the community, wherever it suits his taste. He is found 

 about the cow-shed and barn along with the Pewee and Barn Swallow ; 

 he investigates the pig-sty ; then explores the garden fence, and finally 

 mounts to the roof and pours forth one of the sweetest songs that 

 ever was heard." William Brewster (1886) says that, in western North 

 Carolina, it was "confined almost exclusively to the towns, where it 

 was usually one of the most abundant and conspicuous birds. * * * 

 At Asheville it was breeding in such numbers that nearly every shed 

 or other out-building harbored a pair." 



Nesting. — Almost any suitable cavity or place of support will suit 

 this wren for a nesting site. Dr. S. S. Dickey (Todd, 1940) writes: 

 "Odd and wonderful are the sites that Bewick's Wren habitually 

 chooses for its summer home. Away from the haunts of man, it selects 

 locations suggesting its primitive habits — knotholes in fallen trees in 

 the woods or open fields, natural cavities and woodpecker-holes in 

 trees, or now and then the center of a dense brush heap. But civiliza- 

 tion has provided this bird with an unusual variety of homes. Any 

 opening of ready access invites its attention; among those used are 

 holes in fence posts, tin cans, empty barrels, discarded clothing hung 

 in buildings, baskets, bird boxes, deserted automobiles, oil wells, and 

 crevices in stone, brick, or tile walls." 



Eidgway (1889) adds the following: 



Usually it is in a mortise-hole of a beam or joist, or some well-concealed 

 corner. One was beneath the board covering of an ash-hopper; another, in a 

 joint of stovepipe which lay horizontally across two joists in the garret of a 

 smoke-house ; a third was behind the weather-boarding of an ice-house, while a 

 fourth was in the bottom of the conical portion of a quail-net that had been 

 hung up against the inner side of a buggy shed. None of these nests would have 

 been found had not the bird been seen to enter. 



The nest is generally very bulky, though its size is regulated by that of the 

 cavity in which it is placed. Its materials consist of sticks, straw, coarse 

 feathers, fine chips, etc., matted together with spiders' webs, and lined with tow 

 and soft feathers of barnyard fowls." 



Myra Katie Roads writes to me of a nest that was built in a mail box 

 and disturbed every time the mail was deposited or removed ; it was 

 destroyed before the eggs hatched. There is a set of eggs in my collec- 

 tion, taken by Dr. Dickey ; the nest was built on top of and partly inside 

 a last year's nest of the phoebe; this was plastered to the side of a 

 horizontal beam against the ceiling of the lower story of a sheep shed, 

 8 feet above the ground. 



