210 



THB OOLOOIST 



in spring this tree was a bower of 

 beauty with, luxuriant bloom. 



It was the resort of numbers of this 

 bird and the contrast of their beauti- 

 ful rosy pink dress with the snow 

 white flowers furnished a sight well 

 worth seeing. Our garden was infest- 

 ed with "chick-weed" of which the 

 Purple Finch seemed especially 

 fond and I once caught five of them 

 alive at one haul by setting an ash 

 sifter supported by a clothes pin over 

 a bunch of it with string leading to 

 the house and pulilng out the pin at 

 the proper time. In our front door 

 yard grew two large ornamental fir 

 trees over forty feet tall and almost 

 in the very top of each a Purple Finch 

 nested for a number of years in suc- 

 cession and the only set of eggs of 

 the species I have ever taken in forty 

 years of collecting was here, and I 

 have it yet. To my mind the Purple 

 Finch is one of the very finest song- 

 sters of our N. E. birds and their de- 

 creasing numbers seems especially 

 deplorable. Who sees them now and 

 where? 



H. W. Flint. 

 New Haven, Conn. 



Small Holes. 



A few years ago I was working in 

 Cleveland, Ohio and while there I did 

 some collecting. While blowing some 

 eggs one evening one of the boarders 

 in the house picked up one of my drills 

 and said, "Why we make these in our 

 shop." He was an employee of the 

 Cleveland Dental Manufacturing Com- 

 pany. I asked him to show me the 

 different shapes of drills they made 

 and he had some small cone shaped 

 drills which I liked so I bought some 

 to try them. I have used them for a 

 number of years and find that they 

 will cut the linings of eggs much 

 cleaner than it can be done with the 

 old bud shapes. This makes it pos- 



sible to blow an egg with a smaller 

 hole in the same time. Now I know 

 that cone pointed drills were used 

 years before the bud points for 

 drilling eggs, but they were all heavy 

 long handled drills and of a size too 

 large to use in this way on small 

 eggs. 



The point which I wish to make is 

 that these drills can be obtained in 

 much smaller sizes than I have seen 

 listed by dealers in oological supplies. 

 The smallest of these drills measures 

 a little more than 1-64 of an inch in 

 diameter. The third size is 1-32 of an 

 inch. I was unable to obtain the two 

 smallest sizes in the cone points but 

 he assured me that they were made in 

 those sizes. The sizes are by num- 

 bers. The largest I have measures 

 7-64 of an ich; the smallest cone is 

 22 1-2; 1-32 of an inch and two sizes 

 smaller to 1-64. I have not the number 

 of this size. 



Frank R. Flower. 



Accompanying the above communi- 

 cation the writer sends to us two sets 

 of eggs, one set of 5 Meadowlark and 

 one set of 7 White-bellied Nuthatch, 

 prepared with the drills described 

 above, and we can truly say in our 

 forty years experience in birds egg 

 matters, we have never seen as beauti- 

 fully prepared specimens no matter 

 where they came from or who did the 

 work. The preparation is absolutely 



perfect. 



Heretofore we had given such men 

 as O. W. Howard, Virgil W. Owen, E. 

 J. Court, Edward S. Coombs, Fred M. 

 Dille, F. C. Willard and A. O. Treganza 

 the credit of having reached the high- 

 est possible stage of perfection in the 

 preparation of specimens of this char- 

 acter, but they have all got to take oft' 

 their hats to Mr. Flower. 



