THE OOLOGIST. 



177 



with them, and you could nearly pick 

 them up. Around the flour mills and 

 wholesale houses, there were vast num- 

 bers of them, that came to get the 

 wheat and oats. 



The place where the most of them 

 stayed was in the M. C. R. R. freight 

 depot, where swarms of them stayed 

 there the year around, building their 

 nests inside on the rafters and scant- 

 lings. 



They increased very rapidly as no one 

 molested them. 



Most every large poplar and elm 

 tree, in town had from one to half a 

 dozen nests in. In one nest myself and 

 a friend found thirteen egggs (probably 

 two or three pair in the nest.) 



And also the gutter pipes of private 

 houses made a place for many nests. 



If you would put up a bird house for 

 swallows, these little pests would soon 

 drive them away. 



My brother put up a house and in 

 an half hour it was occupied by a pair. 

 I shot the female and at noon the male 

 came around with another wife which I 

 also shot, and I kept on until I had re- 

 lieved him of four wives. This did not 

 disappoint him, and he soon had an- 

 other which we allowed to stay, and 

 they furnished a nest and laid five eggs, 

 which my brother has with the nest in 

 his collection. This sounds like a mam- 

 oth "fish story," but it can be proven. 



One day my friend and I started out 

 to rampage them. We went to an old 

 vacant house and went on top and pull- 

 ed off a piece of cornice and we could 

 hear the young ones squealing "by the 

 wholesale." We got lots of eggs and 

 killed many old and young ones. 



There is a law in that state allowing 

 three cents a head for them and great 

 numbers were killed evei'y day. Dur- 

 ing the first two weeks over 800 were 

 slaughtered, 200 of which were killed 

 by one boy. 



Farmers' boys loaded their shot-guns 

 with number ten shot and shot them in 



flocks around their barns and straw 

 stacks. One boy killed seventeen with 

 one shot with a number ten gun. My 

 friend and myself did our share too. 



Now they are very shy and hard to 

 approach, and less numbers are killed. 



From December 1st to the middle of 

 last May over 900 certificates wei-e issu- 

 ed to sparrow killers, all of them for 

 ten or over and many of them for over 

 a hundred. 



It is a common occurrence to find 

 their nests in electric light lamps. 

 Wallace L. Briscoe, 

 Minneapolis, Minn. 



Michigan Notes. 



I send you a few extracts from my 

 '91 notes which might prove interesting 

 to some of the readers of the Oolog-ist. 

 I have collected this year and have in 

 my collection 33 different sets of eggs. 

 For a starter the American Redstart is 

 not a very common summer resident of 

 Bay City and there are very few ever 

 seen around the trees. One afternoon, 

 on the 3rd of June, as I was walking in 

 a small wood looking for Vireos nests I 

 happened to notice a small nest about 

 three feet from the ground, situated in 

 between a limb and the trunk of a thorn 

 tree. It was composed of small fibres 

 and cotton and lined with grass and 

 feathers and quite deeply cuped. I 

 shot the female and took it to Mr. New- 

 ell Eddy, who identifies all our speci- 

 mens for us, and he told me it was an 

 American Redstarts nest. Oh ! but I was 

 very glad when he told me what it was 

 because I have made the only record of 

 finding a set of three American Red- 

 starts in Bay City or vicinity. In Dav- 

 ie's ' 'Nest and Eggs of North America 

 Birds" it says as regards to the number 

 of eggs laid by the American Gold-finch 

 ' 'some writers state that the eggs range 

 from three to five, but I can say differ- 

 ent because all of my sets — and I have 

 collected five of them— are five and one 



