208 BrewstTeER, Breeding Habits of Golden-eye Duck. Tae 
the back water from the dam at Errol. Many of the trees have 
fallen or been cut away by the lumbermen within recent years, 
but enough remain to furnish nesting places for numerous Tree 
Swallows, Bronzed Grackles, Woodpeckers, and Whistlers, besides 
a few Wood Ducks, Hooded Mergansers, and an occasional pair 
of Goosanders. 
All the Whistlers’ nests which I have examined have been 
placed over water at heights varying from six or eight to fifty or 
sixty feet and in cavities in the trunks of large hard wood trees 
such as elms, maples, and yellow or canoe birches. As the supply 
of such cavities is limited, even where dead or decaying trees 
abound, and as the birds have no means of enlarging or other- 
wise improving them they are not fastidious in their choice, but 
readily make use of any opening which can be made to serve their 
purpose. Thus it happens that the nest is sometimes placed at 
the bottom of a hollow trunk, six, ten, or even fifteen feet below 
the hole at which the bird enters, at others on a level with and 
scarce a foot back from the entrance, which is usually rounded, 
and from six to fifteen inches in diameter, but occasionally is so 
small and irregular that the Whistler must have difficulty in fore- 
ing its bulky body through. I remember one nest to which the 
only access was by means of a vertical slit so narrow and jagged 
that it would barely admit my flattened hand. 
The eggs are laid on the rotten wood or whatever other debris 
there may be at the bottom of the cavity. When the set is com- 
plete (never before, so far as I have observed) the bird places 
under, around, and even over the eggs, down plucked from her 
breast. The quantity of down varies greatly in different nests. 
Sometimes there is only a very little about the sides and bottom 
of the cavity; often the eggs are warmly banked and completely 
covered with down, while there is usually more or less clinging to 
the edges of the entrance hole. 
The number of eggs in a completed set varies greatly. Oc- 
casionally there are but five or six, oftener from eight to ten, not 
infrequently as many as twelve or ‘fifteen, while I once found 
nineteen, all of which almost certainly belonged to one bird. Itis 
by no means uncommon, however, for two females to lay in the 
same nest, and several of the rounded, pure white, thick-shelled 
