50 Tyler, Brown Creeper in Massachusetts. [jau. 



NOTES ON NEST LIFE OF THE BROWN CREEPER IN 

 MASSACHUSETTS.! 



BY WINSOK M. TYLER. 



In the midst of an extensive wood in the Town of Lexington, 

 Mass., over an area of ten or fifteen acres the land Hes in long, more 

 or less parallel, ridges with hollows between, like great solidified 

 sea-waves, — the eskers of the geologists. From crest to crest is a 

 distance of fifty yards or more. The ridges are covered with well 

 grown white pine and an occasional hemlock. The damper hollows 

 are filled with a luxuriant growth of cinnamon fern, shaded by white 

 and black oak, and red maple. Nearby, to the south, and within 

 two hundred yards toward the west are two swamps, one marshy, 

 the other wooded. For the past five or six years, this region has 

 been infested with brown-tail and gypsy moths, and the life of the 

 trees, especially of those growing on the drier ridges, has been 

 threatened. Indeed, at a point where two ridges join, the moth 

 invasion became so serious that, in despair of saving the trees, 

 many of them were cut down over the space of six or seven acres. 

 Many more trees, killed either by the moths or by a forest fire which 

 ran through the locality year before last, remain standing in the 

 clearing, their bark entirely torn off by the wind or gradually falling 

 away in flakes. 



In this clearing, I heard a Brown Creeper {Certhia familiaris 

 americana) singing on May 5, 1913. Ten days later, early in the 

 morning, I found two Creepers in the clearing. One soon dis- 

 appeared; the other flew back and forth between the burned trees 

 and a growth of sprout oaks a hundred yards to the north. On 

 each return to the clearing, she carried in her bill some dry grass 

 which she took to her nest behind a piece of loose bark, standing off 

 from the trunk of one of the burned oak trees. 



The following notes record the history of this pair of Brown 

 Creepers and the partial history of a second pair which bred eight 

 miles away in Concord, Mass. The record has been made up from 



1 Read at a meeting of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, November 3, 1913. 



