194 TJ. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



reaching the northern limits of their breeding range early in May. 

 In Missouri, according to Widmann (1907), the "first to arrive are 

 the old males followed after a few days by the first females and the 

 first males of the second year. It is from 1 to 2 weeks after the first 

 males have come before their full strength is reached and their song 

 heard everywhere." 



Nesting. — Although there are a few scattered breeding records for 

 Massachusetts, I have seen only one nest here. During the month 

 of June 1915, a pair of orchard orioles built a nest and reared a brood 

 of three young in Berkley, about 8 miles from my home, in a farmyard 

 and close to a house. The nest was suspended from the end of a 

 long, drooping branch of an apple tree and fully 15 feet from the 

 ground. It was well concealed among the leaves and was made 

 almost wholly of freshly dried yellowish grasses, with a few leaves of 

 the tree woven into it; it was deeply hollowed, thin-walled on the 

 sides but with a thickly wadded bottom, and was lined with very, very 

 fine white, silky, woolly substances. I collected the nest after the 

 young had left it, but neither the old nor the young birds were ever 

 seen again. 



T. E. McMullen has sent me the data for four New Jersey nests, 

 ranging from 6 feet up in an elder bush to 10 and 15 feet up in apple 

 and pear trees, and for a North Carolina nest that was 20 feet from 

 the ground in a maple. A. D. Du Bois' notes record a nest found 

 in Lake County, 111., that "was about 8 feet from the ground, hanging 

 at the end of a branch of a small, lop-sided apple tree in an old 

 abandoned orchard on a hill. It was constructed of fresh grasses, 

 gray-green in color, fragrant like new hay. The grasses appeared to 

 have been green when first woven into the nest — a wonderfully woven 

 cup, contracted at the top. This little deserted orchard of barely a 

 dozen trees also hid the nests of kingbird, Baltimore oriole, catbird, 

 robin, yellow warblers, chipping sparrows, a phoebe and a vireo." 



A. C. Reneau, Jr., has sent me his records of 23 nests of the orchard 

 oriole, found near Independence, Kans., of which 8 were in elms, 8 

 in button-bushes, 5 in willows, and 1 each in a cottonwood and a 

 maple. The lowest nest was only 4 feet up in a buttonbush and the 

 highest 30 feet from the ground in a willow. The dates ran from 

 May 14 to July 3. Ten of the nests, six of which were in the same 

 tree, were near kingbirds' nests, one being within 5 feet of such a 

 nest; another was within 25 feet of a marsh hawk's nest. 



In some notes he sent to me on Georgia nests, Frederick V. Hebard 

 says: "The orchard oriole individuals show some tendency to nest at 

 the same time and then to gather in flocks up to 18. Out of five 

 nests, two were built in live oaks, two in pecans and one in a long- 

 leaf pine sapling. The last was lodged in pine needles near the top 



