170 ROBIN ROOSTS. 
small, —only fifty-seven altogether. Of 
these, forty-nine were surely birds of the 
present summer, and only eight unmistak- 
able adult males. If any adult females 
came in, they passed among the unidentified 
and uncounted.! I was glad I had made the 
test. Asa kind-hearted cynic (1 confess to 
being nothing worse than this), I was re- 
lieved to find my misanthropic, or, to speak 
more exactly, my misornithic, notions ill 
founded. As for the sprinkling of adult 
males, they may have been, as a “friend and 
fellow. woodlander’”’. suggests, birds which, 
for one reason or another, had taken up 
with the detestable opinion that “‘marriage 
is a failure.” 
During the month of July, 1890, I made 
frequent counts of the entries at the eastern 
end of the roost, thinking thus to ascertain 
in a general way the rate at which its popu- 
lation increased. On the whole, the growth 
proved to be fairly steady, in spite of some 
mysterious fluctuations, as will be seen by 
the following table: — 
1 A week later, my correspondent reported a similar 
state of things at the Belmont roost. ‘‘A very large 
proportion of the birds are spotted-breasted young of the 
