io8 AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



ular about its nest, and is the easiest to break up. To put the hand 

 in the nest is certain, and generally if the bird is sure that you have seen 

 her carrying a straw to the nest which is a large round ball, composed 

 of grass, with an opening on the side, she will leave it and destroy any 

 Q^ZZ that she may have laid. 



Our representative of the Chickadee is a very beautiful little fellow, 

 a little larger than the American bird, and very highly colored, with a 

 broad metallic black stripe running from the bill, down the breast to the 

 tail. A peculiar thing which we have noticed about this bird is that, it 

 not only uses natural cavities in trees for its nesting place but very often 

 makes use of holes in the ground, where we have found a genuine Tit- 

 mouse nest with its young but thus far we have seen no eggs. 



Ernest B. Caldwell, Foochow. China. 



ODD NESTS IN KANSAS, 



I will descrilDe a few of the odd nests that I have seen here in Kansas. 



The most out of place one was that of a pair of King birds. On the 

 board fence of a cattle gap at a railroad crossing. Several trains 

 passed each day not more than eight feet from the nest. For an Eng- 

 lish Sparrow this would not seem strange, but Sir Tyrannus is not gen- 

 erally friendly even with a freight train. The hottest of all nesting 

 places that I have found was in the tool box of a mowing machine. A 

 pair of Wrens built their nest in this cast iron house and raised a large 

 family in it. I did not take the temperature of the box, but a thermom- 

 eter placed in the dry sand in our yard went up to one hundred and forty 

 six degrees, and any piece of iron laid in the sun soon got too hot to 

 hold in one's hand. The tool box was not over four inches deep and 

 had an iron cover. The Wrens came and went through a hole in the 

 end of the box. The most perfect bit of bird skill was the nest of a 

 Baltimore Oriole, made almost entirely of black and white horse hair. 

 A colony of Crow-blackbirds got a bad habit of using binder twine 

 picked out of straw stacks. It made very strong nests, but they did 

 not have the skill of the Oriole, so the nests were rather fuzzy looking 



affairs. a. K. Boyles, Kansas. 



