120 Zbe TOarbler 



and there there stood in early settler days certain narrow areas of second- 

 growth pines. These grew rather thickly together and their forms were as 

 erect as those of their scattering older fellows were wind-blown, contorted, 

 storm-shattered. 



These ten-inch pines, with the fairer of their older fellows, began to be 

 cut, in most fairly settled portions of North-eastern Wyoming, years ago, 

 for lumber and for building of corrals. And since, even in so dry an at- 

 mosphere, a bull-pine stump rots rapidly, such areas become a mecca for the 

 Long-tailed Black-caps when the instinct of all instincts begins its vernal 

 resurrection. 



Such stumps as have been mentioned are usually about two feet, or a 

 trifle more, in height; and they will average from ten inches to a couple of 

 feet in diameter. The bark is decay-proof, while the outer wood layers will 

 well-nigh crumble in a single season. All this the great-great grandmother 

 of all the Chickadees would seem to have learned in the days of earliest hu- 

 man settlement, and so to have taught her progeny to fashion their easily- 

 excavated burrows accordingly. 



Most of the Chickadee nests, then, in N. E. Wyoming, are found in these 

 low stumps; the rarity of the sites so commonly chosen by the eastern Black- 

 cap being, to some extent, witnessed by the fact that the writer has found 

 but two examples of such forms of site in two seasons of exhaustive study. 

 Of these, the one was excavated by the birds in a rather sound pine stub, at 

 seven feet of height, while the other was in a canyon-example of the preva- 

 lent box-elder. (This cavity, withal its unusual smoothness, roundness and 

 neatness, may possibly have been the work of a Batchelder Woodpecker, 

 though the latter does not knowledgeably occur any nearer the habitat in 

 question than Sioux County, Nebraska.) This cavity has been in use, for 

 at least two seasons, by a pair of House Wrens. The entrances to our 

 Chickadee cavities are most irregular, as the character of the mature bull- 

 pine bark would make inevitable. But the inner cavity varies in tidiness 

 with the conditions of the wood as to degrees of rottenness and the occur- 

 ence therein of knots. In any case, however, the cavity seldom " bites " 

 at all deeply into the wood of the stump, since it follows the areas of least 

 resistance, lying thus fairly between the bark and the mass of the rotten 

 wood behind. The cavities range in diameter from about seven inches, at 

 the widest part, to a possible maximum of ten; the depth running from a 

 foot to a rare sixteen inches. A fair proportion of cavities slant to the one 

 side or the other, below the entrance; the grain of the bull pine running 

 spirally, in many cases. 



In every observed case except one, every particle of the rotten wood 

 removed in the excavating must have been carried some distance from the 

 spot by the the female Chickadee, who does the work (of course). The 



