ROUGH- WINGED SWALLOW 427 



in the lime, and when it decayed it left a tunnel 3 inches wide and 

 several feet deep. The late Arthur T. Wayne first showed it to me. 

 He related that, on one occasion, upon his approach, the bird left 

 the hole and was immediatel}^ pursued closely by a sharp-shinned 

 hawk {Accipiter velox). It eluded its pursuer, however, and dived 

 back into the hole, where it remained. 



Howell (1924) writes: "A most remarkable site selected by one or 

 more pairs of these birds for their nest was on a buttress beneath the 

 deck of a transfer steamboat which made daily trips on the Tennes- 

 see River from Guntersville to Hobbs Island, a distance of 24 miles, 

 leaving at 10 a. m. and returning at 6 p. m. The birds, of course, 

 followed the boat all the way to feed their young. A nest examined 

 on the boat, June 19, 1913, contained young." 



Hollow trees, it seems, are rarely used, but Eifrig (1919) says: 

 "June 10, 1915, I saw a pair * * * nesting in a dead cottonwood 

 on the top of a dune at Millers. * * * The female looked out of the 

 hole and the male perched as close by as he could." Observers agree 

 that the entrance hole of the roughwing's tunnel differs from that of 

 the bank swallow; S. F. Rathbun (MS.) says: "Quickly I detected 

 the difference that existed in the shape of the entrance of the nesting 

 tunnel used by the rough-winged swallow, by contrast with that of 

 the bank swallow; for in the case of the former the shape of the 

 entrance was elliptical, sometimes much so; it was larger and ap- 

 peared carelessly made. But the bank swallow would make the 

 entrance more circular, especially if the digging was easy; it was 

 decidedly smaller, neater in its outline. And a person could readily 

 see these differences even when some distance from the bank." 



Most of the birds that nest in cavities, tunnels, or crevices build 

 either no nest at all or one of indifferent construction; the rough- 

 winged swallow is no exception. S. S. Dickey's (MS.) description 

 of the nests as "loose, crude foundations" is a good one. 



The bulk of the nest depends largely on the size of the cavity that 

 holds it. Nests I have taken from sand banks along the South 

 Carolina coast are l^/o to 1% inches thick and are composed of 

 grasses and rootlets. 



A nest collected by J. F. Freeman (MS.) from a timber under a 

 wharf, where there was plenty of room, is a rather bulky affair, 

 built on a foundation of large chips and pieces of bark deposited 

 during construction of the wharf. The nest proper is made of 

 grasses and a few leaves of live oak {Qiiercns virginianu) and is 

 lined with fine grasses. The distance from the top of the nest to 

 the beam is 5 inches. 



According to locality various materials are used, as grasses, pine 

 needles, straw, weeds, roots, and, as Dickey (MS.) says, "shells of 



