38 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 
the foot of a turf-covered hillock, brown and bare. For several days I 
visited the nest repeatedly, approaching under cover of the hillock with 
the utmost care, only to find that the bird somehow slipped away unob- 
served, leaving the eggs warm behind her. By June 4 two more eggs 
had been added, and on June 8 I finally secured the bird and set, as well 
as an indifferent Kodak photograph of the nest zz sta. 
I found another nest on June 2. It was just completed, and was 
placed ona slope where a cattle path had left a projecting edge of sod. 
There was almost nothing to conceal the nest, and it is possible its con- 
spicuousness caused its abandonment before any eggs were laid. Another, 
found by Mr. Mackay eight miles down the island, at ‘ No 3,’ was reported 
the same day, and contained four eggs. These I took on June 4, obtaining 
a Kodak picture of them as they lay in the nest, which occupied an 
unusual site. It was in a little hollow made by the wind, beneath a 
short bit of board that lay on a flat stretch of bare sod scantily covering 
the sand beneath. The bird was flushed, although she tried to skulk 
away where there was not concealment even for a mouse. Later in the 
day I reached the eastern lighthouse, near which I was shown two other 
nests, with four eggs each, by the members of Mr. Tobin’s family. One 
was embedded in a bank of Crowberry near a small pond, the other ina 
clump of rosebushes. The last set I obtained was on June 11, when I 
almost trod upon the bird as, slipping from the nest, she fluttered away 
along the ground. It was in a tiny clump of budding bushes and grass, and 
contained five eggs, probably two thirds incubated. Shortly before my 
departure I found the beginnings of several other nests, marked by the 
characteristic little cups made in the sand by the birds, in some of which a few 
grass-blades had been deposited. One was in the midst of a prairie of Juni- 
per, a few straws straggling from beneath an upraised spray attracting my 
attention to the nest in the depths below. All the nests seem to be carefully 
concealed, and there is so much ground over which they may be scattered that 
it is no easy matter to secure them. I am told that the more favored 
nesting sites are steep, grassy slopes, terraced often by zigzagging cattle 
paths, where ample protection is afforded behind the lattice-work of 
bleached and storm-matted grasses. Everywhere the trailing stems of the 
Crowberry and Juniper lend a canopy for nests that sometimes repose in 
beds of mosses and lichens, or the edge of some dense little clump of 
bushes is chosen. 
No matter where situated, each nest is placed in a cup-shaped hollow 
about four inches in diameter and fully two in depth, scratched in the sand 
by the birds. It is compactly woven, and well calculated to keep out the 
icy atmosphere that so often prevails on Sable Island even on midsummer 
