THE OOLOGIST. 



161 



THE OOLOGIST 



AMonthly Magazine Devoted to 

 ORNITHOLOGY and OOLOCY. 



FRANK H. LATTIN, ALBION, N. Y. 



EDITOR AND PUBLISHER. 



Correspondence and Items of Interest to the 

 student ot Birds, their Nests and Eggs, solicited 

 from all. 



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•«3.U.Vn SSV10-OWO33S SV ''A 'H 'NCHB-1V IV 30UjO ISOd 3H± XV 03H3XM1 



Black and White Creepers.. 

 (Mniotilta varia.) 



This is one of the little birds which 

 ought to be respected by farmers and 

 husbandmen generally, on account of 

 his extreme usefulness. 



He clears their fruit and forest trees 

 of myriads of destructive insects, par- 

 ticularly ants, although he does not ser- 

 enade them with his songs. 



He seldom perches on the small twigs 

 but circumambulates the trunk and lar- 

 ger branches, in quest of ants and other 

 insects with admirable dexterity. He 

 is evidently nearer related to the Creep 

 ers than to the Warbler, for his hind 

 claw is the largest, and his manner as 

 well as his tongue, which is long and 

 five pointed and horney at the extrem- 



ity characterize him strongly as a true. 

 Creeper. 



He arrives hei*e toward the latter 

 part of April and begins soon after to 

 build his nest. 



One which I had good luck to discov- 

 er was fixed in the crack of the trunk 

 of a large tree, and was composed of; 

 some fibers and dry leaves, lined with, 

 hair and soft cotton like down. 



It contained five young ones recently 

 hatched. This was on the 28th of Ap- 

 ril. 



At about the beginning of Oct. the 

 whole tribe leaves again for the warmer 

 climate, probably the West Indies, 

 though I have bean informed that at 

 least several of them have been per- 

 ceived in the Gulf States during the 

 whole winter. 



The male and female are nearly alike 

 in plumage. 



E. E. Hammett, Jr., 

 Cleveland, O, 



Nesting of the Sharp-shinned Hawk. 



In my collecting this year I have 

 come across two nests of the Sharp-, 

 shinned Hawk, {Accipiter fuscus) built, 

 no doubt, by the same pair of birds. 



On May 16th, while starting out on a 

 collecting expedition with a companion, 

 I observed a Hawk flying over a large 

 wood with something in its claws. I 

 watched it and saw it go down in a 

 patch of pines about a quarter of >a mile 

 distant. The pines, to which we im- 

 mediately went, covered perhaps five 

 acres, and wei'e sparse and tall .at one 

 end and low and thick at the other. 

 While searching for the Hawk's nest, 

 which we believed to exist in the pines, 

 a male Sharp-shinned came around us 

 several times uttering his peculiar cry. 

 At last we found the nest in the thin 

 pines, about thirty feet from the ground. 

 It was built uniformly of dead - pine 

 twigs, was about seven inches across in- 

 side and one inch in depth, and contain-. 



