^°'i6l4 '"^^l ^e^e'-o^ Notes. 539 



gent student of our birds and credit is due him for recognizing at once 

 a bii'd that he had never seen alive before and had no reason to expect to 

 find here. With characteristic modesty he kindly delegates to the writer 

 the making of this report. On the date just mentioned Mr. Nutter found 

 seven nests, all containing eggs. Four sets were collected and deposited in 

 the collection of the Minnesota Academy of Sciences, which institution 

 was the recipient several years ago, of Mr. Nutter's entire collection of 

 eggs and nests. The eggs were prepared by Mr. J. W. Franzen, Curator 

 of the Academy's Museum and proved to be partially incubated, indicat- 

 ing that nesting had been begun in the very early part of May. 



On May 22, the writer accompanied by Mr. Nutter and Mr. Franzen, 

 visited the blackbird colony, examined the nests found by Mr. Nutter and 

 after a little search discovered four additional nests in the immediate vicin- 

 ity of the others. All contained eggs, four or five in number. 



On May 30, I again visited the locality in company with Mr. William 

 Kilgore, another ardent student of bird life. Two more nests were found at 

 this time. All the nests contained young birds just hatched except one of 

 those found on the twenty-second in which there were still five unhatched 

 eggs. So far as our observations went at this time the females alone 

 were carrying food to the young. 



On June 17, Mr. Franzen and myself again visited the marsh and found 

 all the nests emptj^, except the one containing eggs on the thirtieth which 

 had been abandoned before the eggs hatched, one of the original clutch of 

 five being missing and two of the remaining four being broken. The young 

 had apparently flown from the other nests, but neither parents nor young 

 were to be found in the vicinity. This was a disappointment as we were 

 equipped with an umbrella blind and photographic outfit. However, on 

 the edge of the marsh a half mile away and close by a farm house, were 

 found a number of birds where a small accessory colony had been located 

 on the twenty-second. Here the birds were flying about in a bit of fenced- 

 in marsh and in the tops of a grove of trees adjacent to the farm house. 

 Four were shot and one of these proved to be a young of the year nearly 

 full grown. A female contained an egg just about to be laid, suggesting 

 that a second or belated nesting was in progress. One female was seen 

 carrying food but no nests were discovered here. This small colonj' may 

 possibly have been composed of the birds disturbed on May 13 in their 

 nesting operations at the main colony out in the middle of the marsh. 



Thus thirteen nests were found in all. We estimated that probably 

 twenty or twenty-five paii's of these blackbirds were nesting in this marsh, 

 chiefly in one colony, or rather two closely related colonies, the nests 

 grouped rather closely about two foci, some five hundred paces apart. The 

 spot selected was out in the middle of the meadow but close by a thick new 

 growth of willows fringing the main drainage canal. The nests were all 

 rather bulky affairs, on the ground and sunk to the rim in the soft marsh 

 soil and without exception each was placed close to the base of a clump of 

 Marsh Marigolds (Cnltka priluslris). When the nests were first built 



