Vol. XXII 

 1905 



Kennard and McKechnie, Brown Creefer. igi 



On May 8 Mr. McKechnie visited this swamp again and found 

 both birds easily. He watched the male for about an hour, until 

 the female appeared and attracted his attention by perching prac- 

 tically immovable for another hour, watching him, preening herself, 

 etc., until she finally tired him out. The male had during this time 

 visited her often with food. 



An inspection of the supposed nesting site, however, revealed 

 the fact that they had done nothing to it and had apparently 

 moved elsewhere ; possibly they had been frightened away by our 

 watching them on May 1. On May 13 we both visited the swamp 

 at about 9 a. m. We thought we heard their call note once, but 

 we were unable to find them. So, as they were behaving this way, 

 we concluded to make a systematic search, which was finally 

 rewarded after about an hour and a half of wading and crawling 

 in water and sphagnum through all kinds of thickets, high bush 

 blueberries, black alders, clethra, mountain holly, and the like, by 

 the finding of the nest with five fresh eggs behind the bark of a 

 dead 14-inch white pine, some little distance from where we had 

 first seen them. The nest was not what one could truly call 

 conspicuous, only a few twigs showing through a rift in the bark 

 some 12 or 15 feet up, and just above the second limb on the 

 right of the trunk, the whole tree being pretty well covered with 

 bark. On May 16 Mr. McKechnie took a set of six fresh eggs 

 from this nest. The female was sitting as he approached, and 

 stayed on her eggs until he had climbed up and was actually look- 

 ing in at her, when she hopped off the nest, and after clinging for 

 a moment to the trunk just above it, disappeared through a back 

 entrance. 



Both birds hung about the vicinity for a while, but seemed possi- 

 bly less solicitous than had the other pairs in our experience. 

 She only went to the nest once while it was being photographed, 

 and the male fed her occasionally. Plate XII, Fig. 2, shows a 

 back view of this nest as it looked when stripped from the tree, 

 together with its bark thatch. 



On May 12, 1904, at about dusk, while Mr. Kennard was in 

 the top of a red maple on the edge of a swamp in Canton, inspect- 

 ing a Hairy Woodpecker's nest, he heard the call notes of a pair 

 of Brown Creepers as they flitted through the woods behind him. 



