° 1911 ] Du Bois, Nesting of the Whip-poor-will. 471 



on a dead branch a few feet from the young bird and sat there a 

 long time watching the camera. Her calling to the young resulted 

 in its moving several feet toward her, so that the camera had to be 

 re-focused. This was done quietly and as quickly as possible 

 without changing the position of the tripod, and then I left the 

 vicinity entirely. Upon returning some time later to the end of 

 the operating thread, I found the old bird in position for her 

 photograph. It was impossible to distinguish her from her sur- 

 roundings, at a distance of forty or fifty feet, without the aid of 

 the field glass. 



Only one parent was observed during these investigations. 

 Later in the day three other Whip-poor-wills were flushed in the 

 same woods but a search failed to reveal any evidence that they 

 were nesting. 



Again on June 15, a Whip-poor-will was flushed in another woods 

 a few miles further south. She feigned injury in the same manner 

 as previously described; I stopped immediately, and upon looking 

 down found two eggs six feet from where I stood. They were 

 deposited on the dead oak leaves as before and were not concealed 

 by underbrush or otherwise. This nest, like the previous one, 

 was on high ground and in dense woods. 



I desired to test this bird to see if she would remove the eggs 

 after they had been disturbed and it occurred to me to test the 

 bird's discrimination, at the same time, by substituting a pair 

 of Mourning Dove's eggs for her own. Having found a dove's 

 nest earlier in the day, I secured the eggs and left them in place 

 of the Whip-poor-will's. They were practically the same size, — 

 somewhat smaller, — but the difference in coloration was quite 

 pronounced — the dove's eggs being pure white and the Whip- 

 poor-will's richly marked in their characteristic manner. 



Upon returning next day, I stopped thirty feet from the spot 

 at which the eggs had been left. Nothing but leaves could be 

 seen with the unaided eye, and my first thought was that the 

 eggs had been removed, but a look through the field-glass revealed 

 the Whip-poor-will sitting contentedly on the Mourning Dove's 

 eggs, exactly where I had left them the previous day. 



