304 General Notes. [j* 



Auk 



Now what interested me most here was the fact that she not only laid 

 an egg regularly every morning, but that it was also laid at about tlie same 

 hour. The earliest one deposited was at 9.15 a. m. andtbe latest at 10.35, 

 a difference of only one hour and twenty minutes. We must observe, too, 

 that eggs one and four, were laid later than eggs two and three. 



For the first few days she sat upon them only at irregular intervals, and 

 was often absent an hour or more, but this habit soon changed after that 

 time, when she finally gave them her undivided attention. On May 25 

 there were no birds hatched at dark, but on the morning of the 26th three 

 young were in the nest, and the fourth egg, yet unhatched. That is. 

 hatching took place during the night of the 25th. The fourth egg was not 

 hatched until the night of the 26th. Here it will be as well to note that 

 the mother sat on the eggs from dark until daylight, and it is fair to 

 presume that egg number one was among those constituting the first 

 three hatched. But if this be so the first egg was fourteen days in hatch- 

 ing; the second (?) but thirteen days, and the third (?) but twelve days. 

 Again presuming that egg number four was not hatched until the night of 

 the 26th, it, too, was but twelve days before the embryo escaped from it. 

 This is taking it for granted that the first three eggs laid were also the 

 first three hatched; I had no means of assuring myself of this, as I feared 

 if I marked the eggs in any way she might abandon them, and this part of 

 the record would be lost altogether. 



At 6.45 P. m. on June 5, all the birds left the nest together. No one was 

 near it at the time, and there appeared to be no special disturbing cause. 

 There was threatening weather, to be sure, and low rumbling thunder at 

 the time, but no lightning nor loud reports. We were dining at that hour, 

 and my first knowledge of their having left the nest was my attention 

 being called to a young one near the open dining-room door, which led 

 out on the veranda. All the young were easily made prisoners on the 

 ground, and I consigned them to a comfortable cage, which I hung up 

 under the roof close to the nest. Here the parents faithfully fed them 

 through the cage wires until noon of June 8, at which time any one of 

 them could fly fifty or sixty feet with considerable vigor. Fearing that 

 something might happen to them in the cage, at the time just mentioned 

 I took them all down to the lower end of my garden and let them go in 

 the dense underbrush that was overshadowed by numbers of second 

 growth oaks and other trees. The parents were overjoyed at their escape, 

 and it is my hope that none of them fell prey to the many prowling cats 

 about, two of which I had shot in their attempts to get them the last few 

 days the birds remained in the nest. It is not often that the opportunity 

 offers to make as exact notes of the times of egg-laying of birds as are 

 here presented, and I can but trust that they may be of use to those who 

 in the future may have similar chances to observe, and who may care to 

 compare their observations with those of mine. — R. W. Shufeldt, 

 Takoma, D. C. 



