BLACKBIRDS 357 



an island in the Stillwater River below Orono, though not as 

 many as in former years when there were hundreds nesting. 



The nest is a large bulky mass of coarse grasses and sedges, 

 weed stems and similar material, cupped often with mud and 

 lined with grass or a little hair. They generally nest in scat- 

 tered colonies. The nest is variously situated, on the Univer- 

 sity of Maine campus being generally placed in the thick 

 branches of spruce, fir or pine at heights of fifteen to thirty 

 feet. Along the Stillwater River nests are often placed in elms 

 and maples at forty to fifty feet elevation. The top of a 

 broken off stub is often used, or a nest is built in a hollow tree 

 or old Flicker's hole in a stub. 



On the island in the Stillwater River below Orono I found 

 nests in low willow and alder bushes in thickets, and on the 

 ground as well as at various heights in trees. In fact their 

 choice of a nesting site is extremely variable. A nest taken 

 from an elm tree thirty feet from the ground, at Orono, June 

 21, 1892, was four inches high outside by two and a half deep 

 internally, its external diameter was six and its internal diameter 

 three and a half inches. 



The eggs measure 1.10 x 0.86, 1.10 x 0.86, 1.06 x 0.87, 

 1.08 X 0.86. 1.08 x 0.85, and these were almost certainly the 

 third set laid by the birds that season. The general date for 

 fresh eggs is about the middle to the last of May. A nest 

 found at Orono, May 27, 1896, on an island in the Stillwater 

 River was placed in the fork made by two large trunks of a 

 maple tree at two feet from the ground. The eggs measure 

 1.28 X 0.82, 1.23 x 0.85, 1.20 x 0.81, 1.21 x 0.83. At this 

 date nearly all the nests contained eggs though a few had 

 newly hatched young in them. From three to seven eggs, 

 usually five are laid. These are pale greenish white to rusty 

 brown colored, very varyingly and profusely spotted, blotched, 

 lined and scrawled with black, rusty brown, dark brown and 

 lavender. Some eggs are chiefly spotted at the larger end, 

 others over the entire surface, and they show a great variety of 

 coloration and markings. 



