' 1920 J Kennard, Breeding Habits of Rusty Blackbird. 41o 



As the limited space at my disposal will not allow of the tell- 

 ing of all the pleasures and disappointments of our quest through 

 this and succeeding seasons, I shall try merely to give an account 

 of the nests we discovered, with a brief description of the sur- 

 roundings of each, and then tell collectively of the bird's habits 

 as I observed them. 



Carefully, as we thought, arranging the time of our hunt so as 

 to find freshly laid sets of eggs, we were on the ground on May 

 30, and on the 31st succeeded on finding two nests, both with 

 young birds. 



One containing four young birds, two or three days old, was 

 placed about six feet up, against the trunk of a small, thick-grow- 

 ing spruce, on the edge of a thicket of evergreens, growing in a 

 swamp at the endiof a small trout pond. 



The other, containing three young birds one or two days old, 

 and one addled egg, was placed about seven feet up, between the 

 trunks of two spindling little balsams in an almost impenetrable 

 clump of evergreens. This was beside a logging road, perhaps 

 twenty-five yards back, on the bank of an inlet to a large lake. 



As the season hereabouts had been late this year and the woods 

 and swamps were, I am told, still deep in snow during the first 

 week in May, these birds must have started their nest building 

 before the snows disappeared. 



In 1915 we were again in the field after the Essex County birds, 

 and determined to be there on time. May 21 found us in camp, 

 and we spent the morning in a fruitless hunt for the trout pond 

 birds, which had apparently moved back into the swamp, and 

 in the afternoon succeeded in finding two nests on the shore of 

 the larger lake. The first contained four young birds, and was 

 placed about eight feet up, between the tops of two thin little 

 spruces in a thick clump of evergreens. This undoubtedly be- 

 longed to the same pair of birds whose nest we had discovered 

 last year, and was only about fifty yards from their last year's 

 location. These eggs must have been laid by May 5 and the nest 

 started in April, sometime before the snow is ordinarily out of 

 the woods in this region. While the month of May had been ex- 

 ceedingly cold, wet, and disagreeable, the weather during April 

 had been warm and fine, and this perhaps may account for the 

 unusually early nesting of the species this year. 



