Eggs of the Flicker Found in an Odd Place 73 



A slot five inches long, horizontally, and three-eighths of an inch wide, affords 

 a good view from the inside and offers little exposure from without. This slot 

 should be cut in the front, about six inches from the top; no other opening should 

 be made unless a camera is to be used. For the latter purpose, a circular hole 

 ten inches below the "slot" is enough, a two-inch opening for a 4 x 5 camera. 



A blind like this may be made very inconspicuous, converted into a tussock 

 of marsh grass or a hollow brush-heap; it is large enough for every purpose, 

 and even for a blind, comfortable; yet all the permanent parts can be easily 

 put into two coat pockets. 



Eggs of the Flicker (Colaptes auratus luteus) Found 

 in an Odd Place 



By WILLIAM BREWSTER 



IT is known, of course, that the Flickers which inhabit treeless plains in 

 the far West occasionally breed in the faces of earthy banks, somewhat 

 after the manner of Kingfishers and Sand Swallows, and that those found 

 on Cape Cod — where the trees, although abundant, are ordinarily too stunted 

 to afford hollow or decayed trunks of any size — often drill nesting-holes in gate- 

 posts and in the walls of sheds, ice-houses, and other buildings. These departures 

 from the practice of nesting in tree-trunks — usually adopted by the Flicker and 

 almost, if not quite, invariably followed by all other Woodpeckers — are suffi- 

 ciently interesting and, indeed, surprising. But that the Flicker may occasionally 

 depart even more widely from the normal habit of its kind in respect to its choice 

 of a nesting-place is suggested by an experience which befell Miss Bertha M. 

 Saltmarsh and Miss Helen Farnsworth in 1906. These ladies were spending 

 the summer of that year at West Yarmouth, where, not far from a tidal creek 

 that almost separates the promontory known as Great Island from the mainland 

 of Cape Cod, some cottages and a small summer hotel had been built a year or 

 two before. From this little settlement a straight and wide but neglected road 

 (used, indeed, only in summer, when the hotel and cottages are occupied, and 

 then but seldom, for it is very sandy) leads toward Hyannis through wooded 

 uninhabited country. In one of its stretches, fully a quarter of a mile from the 

 nearest house and bordered on both sides by dense woods of pitch pines, the 

 ladies found five eggs of the Flicker lying together in a hollow in the ground 

 within a few feet of the deeply rutted wagon track. This happened on July 14. 

 As the eggs were evidently deserted, the ladies took two of them at that time. 

 The remaining three were taken four days later, when my friends Mr. and Mrs. 

 William Stone were shown this curious nest (?). I visited it in company with 

 the Stones and Miss Saltmarsh on the 26th of the month. It was a circular, 

 saucer-shaped depression, measuring 21^ inches across the top, by 3 inches 

 in depth. Dry yellowish sand mixed with fine gravel and wholly free from vegeta- 



