^"'•'■^^''n General Notes. 



igoi 



399 



meadow in Byfield parish, town of Ncwbuiw. The locality is not many 

 miles from the pond where the pair of Purple Gallinules was seen in June, 

 1897, as I have alread\' recorded in 'The Auk ' (April, 1901, p. 190). 



Dendroica blackburniae. — The peculiar behaviour, akin to that of many 

 ground-nesting species, of a female Blackburnian Warbler whose nest 

 with three young and an infertile egg I found on June 21 of this year in 

 Lynnfield, a small town near Boston, may be worthy of note. The nest 

 was at the end of a long branch of a hemlock, being 18 feet out from the 

 trunk and 30 feet from the ground. Before any attempt was made to 

 crawl out on the branch, the female, alarmed doubtless by a slight move- 

 ment of the limb, suddenly tumbled out of the nest and fell, in fluttering, 

 fledgling style, straight do^vn through the foliage to the ground, recov- 

 ering herself at the last moment before touching the earth and Hying up 

 into the underbrush. The helpless way in which she fell led me to 

 believe for a moment that a full-grown yoimg bird had dropped out of the 

 nest. Even when there were young in a nest, I never before noticed 

 such behaviour on the part of a tree warbler nesting at such a height. 



Dendroica blackburnice is a rare but regular breeder in the town of Lynn- 

 field. It also probabl\- breeds in the adjoining well-wooded towns of Mid- 

 dleton and North Reading, as I have observed the species' in summer 

 in both places. 



The Lynnfield Black!)urnian's nest above referred to agrees with a nest 

 of the same species taken in Winchendon, Mass., by Mr. Brewster in re- 

 sembling "rather closely the nest of the Chipping Sparrow" (Auk, Oct., 

 1888, p. 392). It is composed of fine hemlock twigs and lined with a few 

 pine needles. It was set firmly in among twigs and was beautifully con- 

 cealed from \iew above by a long, full-leaved, horizontal spray, which, 

 arching over within two inches of the structure, made a miniature A-lent 

 for the sitting bird. 



Progne subis. — Mr. A. H. Kirkland, late entomologist to the Massachu- 

 setts State Board of Agriculture, informs me that while observing the rav- 

 ages of the fire-worm {Rhofobota vacciniana Pack.) in the cranberry bogs 

 of Plymouth and Barnstable counties, he found the Purple Martins feeding 

 freely on the imagos of the pest. The Martins were abundant at many of 

 the bogs, a Martin box on a pole being, according to Mr. Kirkland, "ap- 

 parently as much a necessary adjunct to a well-regulated bog as a dyke or 

 a cranberry house." 



As two broods of the imagos of the fire-worm are on the wing during 

 the summer, and as the female imagos are most active before laying their 

 eggs, the benefits accruing to the cranberry grower from the presence of 

 the Martins are obvious. Mr. Kirkland states that the cranberry growers 

 estimate that in a term of years they lose fifty per cent of their crops 

 because of the damage done by injurious insects, chief among which is 

 the fire-worm. 



Colaptes auratus. — The instance of the nesting of the Flicker ( C. aura/us) 

 within a building, as recorded in the Monograph of the Flicker (Wilson 



