TRICOLORED REDWING 183 



tingly, and with such uniformity of success that a visitor can determine the very 

 day when first eggs, second eggs, and so on, laid by practically every female 

 member of the commune. Newcomers — and there is from now on a constant 

 stream of influx — in like manner, group themselves in a section immediately 

 adjoining the central colony. These first tarry for recruits, and then set to at a 

 given signal. Thus, in contiguous but distant sections of a large swamp, one may 

 find the nest-under-construction group, the one-egg-laid group, the just-hatching 

 group, and so on, all on the same day. In some smaller swamps, there are con- 

 centric rings of activity. 



John G. Tyler (1907) tells of a colony in a dense growth of nettles 

 in a low, damp sink at the end of an abandoned slough: 



In the lowest land the nettles were very dense and some of them were six feet 

 or more in height; but toward the border where the ground was higher and dryer 

 they gradually became smaller until at the outer edge they were scarcely six 

 inches high and were finally replaced by a rather thin growth of foxtail grass. 

 On two sides of the nettle patch was a more or less dense fringe of willows. * * * 



Before reaching the nettles I was somewhat surprised when a female blackbird 

 fluttered up from the grass and revealed a nest built on the bare ground. A 

 rather hasty search resulted in the finding of several other nests in like situations. 

 These were all built out in the short thin grass and not concealed at all or pro- 

 tected from the rays of the sun and would certainly have made a rich harvest for 

 some prowling egg-eater. There was nothing, however, to indicate that they had 

 been disturbed in any way. 



After entering the nettles, he found that there "were nests every- 

 where: in some instances three or four built one on top of another, tho 

 in such cases only the upper one appeared to be occupied. The 

 average height from the ground was between one and three feet, but 

 many were seen that were ten and twelve feet up in the willows. 

 They were all built almost entirely of grass stems that had been 

 freshly pulled, giving the nests a bright, green appearance. Some 

 of them had a few coarse brown weed stems woven into the framework 

 but in the majority no other material but the grass was used and none 

 contained any lining. As the heads of the grass had not been detached, 

 the nests presented a ragged, fuzzy appearance." 



A fact that impressed him more, perhaps, than anything else was 

 that "in the center of the colony where the nettles were thickest, 

 nearly all of the nests contained small young birds and doubtless it 

 was the parents of these that I first saw. A little farther out, however, 

 there were full sets of badly incubated eggs while near the outside 

 were incomplete sets of fresh eggs." 



Eggs. — Dawson (1923) says that — 



"four eggs being the stern rule of A. tricolor, sets of five or six were pretty sure to 

 contain an egg structurally weak. The lime had played out. Of the only set of 

 seven found, one egg collapsed in the nest, and another in being transferred to the 

 collecting box. * * * The eggs of the Tricolored Redwing are normally of a 

 pale niagara green tint, sharply and sparingly marked — small-blotched or short- 

 scrawled — with an intense brownish black pigment. The variation, not in the 

 380928—57 13 



