OLIVE-SIDED FLYCATCHER 291 



Anthony informs me that this Flycatcher was occasionally observed 

 by him up to 11,000 feet, and evidently nesting." 



The olive-sided flycatcher is a typically boreal bird. It would seem 

 from the above statements as to its haunts that its chief requirements 

 for a summer home are coolness, the presence of coniferous trees, and 

 the proximity of water; all these are combined in its more northern 

 haunts, and in its mountain resorts it enjoys the coolness of the higher 

 altitudes. But it seems rather strange to find it breeding contentedly 

 almost down to sea level in the San Francisco Bay region and even 

 in the city of Berkeley, as will be referred to later. Here the cool, 

 often ioggy, climate seems to offer a congenial summer home among 

 the pine and eucalyptus groves, with suitable nesting sites in the 

 Monterey cypresses. 



Courtship. — Dr. Dickey sends me the following brief note on this 

 subject : "It arrives from its winter quarters from May 15 to June 1 

 and is pretty sure to be found year after year in favorable habitats. 

 Then it is that the males are brimful of vivacity. They combat for 

 the possession of territory, sometimes dashing at each other and 

 actually causing the feathers to fly. At this season males are seen 

 to pursue females across the canopies of evergreen forests. Through- 

 out a period of at least two weeks such immoderate activities prevail 

 among these birds. They then have finished their mating and have 

 chosen their breeding sites." 



Nestings. — The first nests were found by Nuttall (1832) at Mount 

 Auburn, near Boston, Mass., in 1831 and 1832. The first was "dis- 

 covered, in the horizontal branch of a tall red cedar 40 or 50 feet 

 from the ground. It was formed much in the manner of the King- 

 bird, externally made of interlaced dead twigs of the cedar, internally 

 of the wiry stolons of the common cinquefoil, dry grass, and some 

 fragments of branching Lichen or Usneay The nest that he found in 

 1832 was similar, but only 14 or 15 feet up in a "small juniper." 



In the same locality, in 1867, Mr. Brewster (1906) found two nests 

 "on the horizontal branches of isolated pitch pines." And in 1868, 

 in the same locality, he again found two nests ; "one, with three fresh 

 eggs, was in an apple tree (an unusual situation), near the extremity 

 of a long, drooping branch and about twelve feet above the surface 

 of a little pond"; the other was "in the same small pitch pine in which 

 one of the nests of the preceding year had been placed. On both 

 occasions the birds built so very near the ground that I could look into 

 their nest by pulling down the slender branch on which it rested." 



The seven nests that we found near Triangle Pond in Plymouth 

 and the two found by Mr. Bangs in Wareham, Mass., were all sim- 

 ilarly located and made of similar materials. They were all in pitch- 

 pine woods, where the trees were small or of moderate size, seldom 



