400 BULLETIN 19 6, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



KEGULUS CALENDULA^CALENDULA (Linnaeus) 

 EASTERN RUBY-CROWNED KINGLET 

 HABITS 



The ruby-crowned kinglet is not brilliantly colored, for it is clad 

 in soft olive and gray, but it is a dainty little bird with attractive 

 manners; only when it shows its red crown-patch under excitement is 

 there any brilliancy in its plumage, but when it bursts into its mar- 

 velous song it ranks as one of our most brilliant songsters. What it 

 lacks in color it makes up for in music. 



It ranges much farther north in summer and goes farther south in 

 winter than the golden-crowned kinglet, breeding from northwestern 

 Alaska down through the Rocky Mountains to Arizona and New 

 Mexico, and in eastern Canada as far south as Nova Scotia. There 

 are also breeding records for Michigan and Maine and indicated 

 breeding in Massachusetts. 



I found the ruby-crowned kinglet breeding in some very attractive 

 hillside woods back of Bay of Islands, Newfoundland. It was rather 

 an open tract of mixed woods consisting mostly of fir balsams, with 

 some red and white spruces, larches, and white pines and a sprinkling 

 of canoe birches, black birches, and mountain-ash. Amelanchier 

 and Rhodora were in bloom, and the blossoms on the Arbutus were 

 larger and whiter than we see them at home. The kinglets were in 

 full song, adding much to the beauty of their surroundings. 



Dr. Paul Harrington writes to me that, in the vicinity of Toronto, 

 Ontario, "the ruby-crowned kinglet is a typical bird of the black 

 spruce bogs, and it is only on rare occasions that this bud is foimd out 

 of these regions in the breeding season." 



Bagg and Eliot (1937) record the almost certain breeding of this 

 kinglet at Savoy, Mass. William J. Cartwright had seen the kinglets 

 feeding their young in a grove of spruce at the top of a hill on July 5, 

 1915; there was a flock of about 20, including old and young, evidently 

 two families. On July 19, 1920, he again found six in the same grove 

 of spruces. And Mr. Bagg adds: "Visiting this hill-top with Mr. 

 Cartwright early on July 3, 1932, Mr. H. E. Woods and I both had the 

 thrill of seeing a Ruby-top feed an out-of-the-nest fledgling and in the 

 act erect its crown-spot. None, however, could be found on June 11, 

 1933, and the old spruces are dying and fast being removed by the 

 State Forest authorities." (See also Bagg, 1932, p. 486.) 



The ruby-crowned kinglet undoubtedly breeds more or less rarely 

 in Maine, where the dense woods of mixed spruces and fir balsam 

 often extend quite down to the coast. Ora W. Knight (1908) mentions 

 watching a pair building a nest in deep woods of this type near 

 Orono. 



