No. 4.] REPORT OF STATE ORNITHOLOGIST. 397 



birds. Cold and stormy weather continued until July 9, when 

 I made another attempt to photograph the birds, and found that 

 all the young birds in both houses were dead, and only a few of 

 the old birds remained. Possibly this weather killed most of 

 the adult birds, as few of them have been seen since. Arthur 

 W. Brockway of Connecticut reports a similar experience. 



I advised Mr. Parker's man to clean out the house and see 

 how many dead it contained. Mr. Parker wrote me on the 12th 

 that the man had done so, and reported all the young birds dead. 

 There were four or five well-feathered young dead in each nest 

 and one adult bird. The young were well grown and feathered, 

 but he did not count the full number. At least four of the adults 

 were still alive. These began carrying in nesting material after 

 the nests and dead young had been removed, but as the weather 

 continued cold and stormy they did not attempt to rear another 

 brood. The number of martins increased, however, to 12, all of 

 which disappeared in August, probably on the way to the south. 



In looking over some swallows' nests to learn if they had been 

 seriously affected by the stormy weather which killed the mar- 

 tins, I found only five dead young, and inquiries of others seem 

 to prove that swallows suffered no serious diminution. 



The destruction of the martins, which always suffer most 

 during such storms, may be attributed to their inability to with- 

 stand cold or to find insects otherwise than on the wing, for cold 

 storms clear the air of all flying insects. Probably the June 

 and July storms of 1914 were not severe enough to more than 

 decimate the martin colonies, and probably they have left a 

 nucleus for continuing the species. 



The Staeling. 

 The Old World Starling {Sturnus vulgaris) is now quite 

 generally distributed over the three southern New England 

 States, and has been reported from every State in New Eng- 

 land. Although it is not yet more than locally common in Mas- 

 sachusetts, it has already begun to show fruit-eating propensi- 

 ties as it did when introduced into New Zealand. In Septem- 

 ber, 1914, on the farm of William P. Wharton in Groton, I 

 saw apples that apparently had been pecked and ruined by star- 



