30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



dian River and Rohoboth Bayp, we went ashore for an hour or 

 so. The beach was birdless, but back on the marsh a quarter 

 of a mile we found numbers of Least Sandpipers and a few 

 Greater Yellowlegs, while on a dry, sandy waste was a single 

 male Bobolink, not a common species so close along the shore. 



A Fish Hawk's nest, to wiiich I climbed, contained three 

 eggs, and halfway up its side, well secured among the coarse 

 sticks, boards and corn stalks was a bulky nest of the Purplr 

 Grackle with five eggs. We ran our boat up the unfinished 

 canal that was to have joined Rehoboth Bay with Delaware Bay 

 near Lewes, tied up and spent the night lulled to sleep by the 

 monotonous calls of the ^Miip-poor-wills. Early the following 

 morning I strolled to a near-by wood. Tufted Titmice, Pine 

 Warblers and Ovenbirds were there; and I detected an appa- 

 rently familiar fine-spun but elusive note in the tree tops that 

 puzzled me, but after sometime I caught sight of a pair nf 

 Cerulean Warblers verj' actively searching for food among the 

 branches — my old friends of the Chojjtank bottom.* A Cardi- 

 nal's nest containing one egg of the owner and two of the Cow- 

 bird was also found. 



We were off at 8.15 o'clock for the bay. Numerous Fish 

 Hawks were seen flying about, and several nests were in sight. 

 One old bird was carrying material for repairing a nest, and we 

 had a good view of his manner of grasping it. He was carry- 

 ing what seemed to be a piece of reed or weed two feet long, 

 with considerable brush at the end. It was held lengthwise in 

 the direction of the bird's flight, and grasped by both feet one 

 well in advance of the other, and both legs apparently extended 

 downward to about their full length, so that the load was clear 

 of the body, but offered little resistance to flight. We visited 

 several nests of the Fish Hawk, one in a persimmon bush right 

 up among the small branches, which seemed too light to sup- 

 port such a weight ; another in a fork of a good-sized oak stand- 

 ing alone by the water was easil}' reached from the top of a wire 

 fence. Another nest was sixty feet up on a tall almost dead 

 tree supported by a single limb, and still another had been 

 placed on the roof of a deserted house supported on the ruins 

 of the crumbling chimney. This one had, however, been 



*See The Auk, 1005, p. 194. 



