4 Massachusetts Audubon Society 



ered. Scolding away incessantly Mrs, Wren would take a feather in her 

 beak and pull it out of the box and drop it overboard despite the remon- 

 strances of Mr. Wren. But he kept on singing to her and finally, half molli- 

 fied, she was persuaded to continue the nest in that box, probably because 

 she saw that no one used the hammock who at all disturbed the birds. My 

 observation next day showed that all the feathers she had brought out had 

 been carried back into the box and domestic life was again peaceful with 

 the Wren family.' 



" 'Wrens,' Mrs. Coates went on to say, 'have the peculiarity of beginning 

 to build their second nest before the young are flown from the first. She saw 

 one of the pairs of house wrens near her house begin to build their second 

 nest while their three little ones were still in the old nest and they were yet 

 feeding them diligently.' " 



On September 7th four snowy egrets were seen in a marsh in the town of 

 Harwich by a summer resident who approached them by canoe within some 

 thirty yards and was able to watch them for some time. The report is from 

 a competent observer. 



The June "Bulletin" recorded the presence of a junco in Beverly on 

 Jime 9th, a record for that vicinity. Mr. Horace Taylor, of the Brookline 

 Bird Club, has since reported juncos seen in Winchester and in Arlington, 

 Mass., on the estate of Samuel J. Elder, during the week beginning July 1st. 

 Mr. Taylor thought them to be breeding. 



FROM R. W. Merrick, Executive Secretary of the Committee 



QUINCY, MASS. on Food Production, Quincy, Mass., sends the follow- 

 ing interesting notes under date of August 27: 



"Last year the rose-breasted grosbeaks were very nmnerous here; so 

 were potato bugs. This year almost no potato bugs, also very few grosbeaks. 

 Whether this just happened so, or whether they were wise enough to know 

 that bugs were going to be short and moved to other places, I do not know, 

 but the fact remains that I have seen or heard but few of the birds this year. 



"The Baltimore orioles have been unusually numerous, and for the last 

 few days those around my house have been singing a good deal, not the 

 full spring song, but much more than they ordinarily do at this season of 

 the year. 



"The black and white creeping warblers have been more numerous than 

 I have ever before seen them. A pair of white-breasted nuthatches nested 

 somewhere just back of my house. 



"On June 17, I saw down on the Marshfield marshes a great white heron, 

 and I understood at the time that he had been around there for some little 

 time. He surely made a striking feature as he walked across the marsh. 



"There is one interesting point about birds returning to the same place 



