352 BULLETIN 197, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Quebec. He made the best of this unusual opportunity by watching 

 the birds and their nesting activities from June 12 to July 14, 1919, 

 climbing to the nest daily and often more than once a day. As a re- 

 sult of his observations, has has given us a full, accurate, and detailed 

 account of the home life of these birds, to which the reader is referred 

 for details. Although the locality was near the citj^ it was not 

 strictly urban, for a woodland area of mixed deciduous and coniferous 

 trees, which was two or three square miles in extent, aproached to 

 within about 30 feet of the nesting-tree. He describes the nest as 

 follows : 



About four feet from the top of a young Rock Maple which was one of a row 

 of such trcvs a small twig sprang at a considerable upward incline from the 

 south side of the main stem of the tree, which was here one and one-fourth 

 inches thick. The twig itself is one-fourth of an inch in thickness, and at a 

 distance of one and one-eighth inches from the main trunk it divides at an angle 

 of fifty degrees into two nearly equal parts, each of which is about five inches 

 long and ends in a cluster of leaves. The pensile nest, which was well hidden 

 and shaded by foliage, was hung from the fork between these two small twigs, 

 at a height of twenty-four feet, eight inches, from the ground. Although the 

 lower part of it is roughly circular, the rim is "gathered" to the twigs, so that 

 the opening is shaped like a sector of a circle, with the two twigs as radii, and 

 the outer rim as the arc of the sector. The acute angle between the twigs 

 is filled in for about three-quarters of an inch with nesting material. The 

 "gathering' of the rim of the nest, causing the walls to be incurved at the top, 

 must have been efficacious in retaining eggs and young within it when it tossed 

 and swayed in the breeze, as it did very much in the slender top of the 

 tree. * * * 



The outside of the nest is composed of fine strips of the outer bark of White 

 Birches, dead grass blades, coarse white hen feathers, bits of frayed white twine, 

 one spider's white "cocoon," and much spiders' web. The birch bark is much 

 the most conspicuous material. Ends of strips of it have been left loose, so 

 that they flutter in the breeze, breaking up the outline of the nest and helping 

 to conceal it. At points where strips of birch bark cross one another they some- 

 times seem to possess mutual adherence without visible binding material, as 

 though they had been gummed together, perhaps by the bird's saliva. The nest 

 is fastened to the twigs by spiders' web, strips of birch bark, string, and grass 

 blades. The interior is lined chiefly with fine dead grass stems and flower 

 splkelets, but the lining includes also one or two needles of the White Pine and 

 several white hen feathers, finer than th.ose on the outside of the structure. 



The building of the nest was apparently well under way when Dr. 

 Lewis first noticed the birds on June 11, and on June 15 the nest held 

 the first egg. Both birds seemed interested in the construction of the 

 nest, but, as he usually could not distinguish between the sexes, he was 

 not sure that the male did any work on the nest. 



Charles E. Doe has sent me his notes on a Philadelphia vireo's 

 nest that he found on a small island at the north end of Moosehead 

 Lake, Maine, in July 1907. On July 7 he saw both birds working on 

 the nest, 35 feet from the ground, attached to a lower limb of a big 

 yellow birch on the edge of some dense spruce timber; there was no 



