V0l 'ifi5 XI1 ] Simmons, Nesting of Texan Birds. 331 



Baeolophus bicolor. Tufted Titmouse. — On May 20, 1911, I 

 located my first nest of this common resident. It was in an old Wood- 

 pecker hole thirty feet up in a tottering pine stump in a clearing in the 

 Buffalo Bayou woods about nine miles west of the city. I could not 

 examine it, for it was impossible to make my climbers hold in the soft wood, 

 but I felt sure it contained young as one of the parents carried an insect 

 in its bill. 



On March 22, 1913, while wandering through the woodlands along the 

 bayou about four and a half miles west of Houston, I found a cavity con- 

 taining five eggs. The dead oak stood in open woods not a hundred yards 

 from the line dividing the prairie and the timber lands. The nest was in a 

 natural cavity, between the bark and wood of the stub of a five inch limb, 

 about ten feet from the ground. It was a mass of rubbish of all sorts: 

 pieces of dead elm leaves, horse hair, cast-off snake skin, small chips of the 

 oak bark, cow hair, pieces of dead grass, small green lichens, weeds and 

 plant fibres, and was back in the body of the tree eleven inches from the 

 entrance. So closely did the bird sit that I was forced to pull her out by 

 the tail. She was sitting with her head towards the heart of the tree, in a 

 space scarcely large enough for her body. 



The five eggs measured: .73 X .56; .72 X .56; .72 X .55; .71 X .56; 

 and .70 X .56. 



Hylocichla mustelina. Wood Thrush. — Very rare during the 

 summer months in deciduous woods, and breeds. 



On April 29, 1911, I discovered a nest in easy view on a bare limb of a 

 small oak sapling in open oak woodlands on Buffalo Bayou about six miles 

 west of the city. It was twelve feet from the ground and set firmly on a 

 horizontal fork three feet from the trunk, and was composed of grasses, 

 weed stems, inner fibre of Spanish moss, and fine rootlets ; it contained large 

 quantities of mud, and was shaped into a very neat bowl, the bottom almost 

 flat and the sides perpendicular. No mud showed outside, though the sides 

 of the nest were very thin, but the inside was as smooth as a piece of pottery, 

 none of the nesting material showing through the wall of mud. Into this 

 neat bowl had been placed a lining of fine rootlets and grass stems. The 

 nest measured two and three-quarter inches in depth externally, two 

 inches deep inside, four and three-quarter inches in diameter externally, 

 and three and a quarter inches in diameter inside. 



The nest contained one of the Wood Thrush's blue eggs and one egg of 

 the Dwarf Cowbird. On May 6, I returned and found both eggs in frag- 

 ments on the ground beneath the nest. On both trips the birds were 

 present; the nest was deserted with the destruction of the eggs. 



