BOHEMIAN WAXWING 67 



hard at work carrying the nest material elsewhere. When we ceased 

 watching there was very little of the nest left. On July 5 we hap- 

 pened to pass this place and were surprised to see the nest intact and a 

 bird upon it. It yielded a set of five eggs." Of the first nest he says : 

 "Found June 19, nest just begun; June 21, nest completed; June 22, 

 contained one egg ; June 24, 3 eggs ; June 25, 4 eggs ; June 26, five eggs, 

 set taken." Of the nests in general, he says ; 



The building material was always the same, an outer structure of dead twigs, 

 lending support to a mass of black moss and wbite plant fiber. Dry grass was 

 used as a lining sometimes but not always. The black moss was the one material 

 that was used in the gi'eatest amount, and it appears in all but one of the nests. 

 This moss grows abundantly on the conifers of the region, depending from the 

 branches in great masses, like coarse hair. The white plant fiber that is also so 

 conspicuous in the nests is from the seed pod of the previous year's dead "fireweed" 

 (Epilohium angustifolium) . 



Thei'e was one additional feature in which the nests were all alike, something 

 that could not be preserved. Invariably there was a mass of stuff depending six 

 or eight inches below the nest proper, so loosely attached as to seem on the verge 

 of dropping away. This stuff was mostly the moss and the white plant fiber; 

 usually additional tufts of these materials were adhering to nearby branches. 



Of the two nests found at Doch-da-on Creek, 50 miles down the 

 river, he says : "Each was near the top of a fir, about twenty-five feet 

 from the ground, supported upon a branch and by surrounding twigs, 

 and close to the trunk. On July 15 one of these nests was taken, to- 

 gether with a set of three eggs. The other contained two eggs, and 

 was left undisturbed. No more eggs were laid in this nest, the female 

 being still incubating the two eggs some days later." 



Several other accounts of the nesting of the Bohemian waxwing have 

 been published, but they are not sufficiently different from some of 

 those mentioned above to warrant quoting them here. Some of them 

 are quoted in Mr. Swarth's (1922) paper, to which the reader is 

 referred. 



Eggs. — Mr. Swarth (1922) found one of these waxwings incubating 

 on two eggs for "some days," but usually the set consists of four to six. 

 The eggs are almost exactly like those of the cedar waxwing but de- 

 cidedly larger. Mr. Swarth describes his eggs as follows : "In color, 

 three of the sets are much alike, a pale glaucous blue, close to Ridg- 

 way's 'pale dull glaucous-blue,' but more washed out. This ground 

 color is marked rather profusely with blackish dots and with a few 

 fine, irregular lines, the dots mostly quite small and occurring over 

 nearly the entire egg, though less numerously at the smaller end than 

 elsewhere. There are also obscure underlying spots of bluish, but 

 faintly seen. The fourth set (No. 1821) is more olivaceous, the ground 

 color close to Ridgway's 'mineral gray.' The spots are fewer in num- 

 ber than in the other sets, larger, and more sharply defined." 



The measurements of 50 eggs average 24.6 by 17.4 millimeters ; the 



