304 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



saw a little bird flit out from beneath a rock close by 

 the path on the left of it, where there were only very 

 few scattered dwarf black sprace* about, and, looking, 

 I found a nest with three eggs. It was the Fringilla 

 hyemalis^ which soon disappeared around a projecting 

 rock. It was near by a conspicuous spruce, six or eight 

 feet high, on the west edge of a sort of hollow, where a 

 vista opened south over the precipice, and the path as- 

 cended at once more steeply. The nest was sunk in the 

 ground by the side of a tuft of grass, and was pretty 

 deep, made of much fine dry grass or sedge (?) and 

 lined with a little of a delicate bluish hair-like fibre (?) 

 two or three inches long. The eggs were three, of a reg- 

 ular oval form, faint bluish-white, sprinkled with fine 

 pale-brown dots, in two of the three condensed into a 

 ring about the larger end. They had apparently just 

 begun to develop. The nest and tuft were covered by a 

 projecting rock. Brewer says that only one nest is known 

 to naturalists.^ We saw many of these birds flitting 

 about the summit, perched on the rocks and the dwarf 

 spruce, and disappearing behind the rocks. It is the 

 prevailing bird now up there, i. e. on the summit. They 

 are commonly said to go to the fur countries to breed, 

 though Wilson says that some breed in the Alleghanies. 

 The New York Reports make them breed on the moun- 

 tains of Oswego County and the Catskills.^ This was 

 a quite interesting discovery. They probably are never 



^ [The red spruce of the uplands of northern New England was not 

 generally distinguished from the black in Thoreau's day.] 



2 [" Synopsis of the Birds of North America," appended to the 1840 

 Boston edition of Wilson's American Ornithology (p. 703). J 



^ Prevail in Nova Scotia according to Bryant and Cabot. 



