24-4 Roberts, The Prothonotary Warbler in Minnesota. [hip 



impossible places, and they have year after year taken possession 

 of them and built nests in them with great labor, and reared their 

 young within a few feet of the thundering trains, clanking and 

 creaking machinery of the draw, and escaping steam from the 

 engine house high on the top of the draw in midstream. At the 

 time of our visit, June 24, a pair were building a second nest in a 

 cigar box nailed to a window casing of the engine room, carrying 

 to this lofty, exposed position, great bunches of moss from the 

 distant shore, with a sweeping wind blowing them hither and 

 thither, and making the task a well-nigh impossible one. Lower 

 down, just where the outer end of the draw came banging against 

 the abutting pier, and not four feet from the rail, a female 

 Prothonotary was sitting composedly on her nest, built in the 

 bottom of a tin ventilator cap that had been knocked from a lamp 

 box and fallen, open end up, down between the box and a girder, 

 supporting a much used ladder. The little cup-like cap was four 

 inches high, and three inches in diameter, and the birds had 

 partly filled it with the usual green moss and fine grass. It 

 contained the customary full first set of six eggs. (See Fig. 5.) 

 Still another pair had a nest in a shallow cavity in a piece of 

 slab wood, nailed to one of the tressel supports and close under 

 the roadbed of the railroad. 



The male of the pair engaged in building in the cigar box on 

 the engine house window had, before the box was nailed up by 

 Mr. Harrison, investigated the entire inside of the engine room, 

 entering by the open door. Mr. Harrison thinks the male always 

 selects the nesting place. This one first examined carefully into 

 the merits as a building site of the tin drinking cup hanging 

 against the wall and then spent some time going in and out of an 

 old soft hat that reposed in a large pigeon hole in one corner of 

 the room. He did not abandon this indoor quest until the box 

 outside was offered him when he at once accepted the suggestion 

 and was soon off for his waiting mate who, after a little earnest 

 coaxing, accepted the tenement, and they at once went to work to 

 furnish it, — no easy task, as already described. (See Fig. 6.) 



It certainly seemed most strange after having spent most labori- 

 ous days in making the acquaintance of this elegant little bird in 

 its secluded natural haunts, to find it here in all the steam, smoke 



