40 



THE OOLOGIST. 



I'bC^l 



spent the day here, as 'did a Marsh 

 Hawk. 



April 15 —I made my first trip after 

 sets of Buteo borealis today. My route 

 was north, through the valley, except 

 when I tnrned to clioab the hillsides 

 to where the nehts were. Weather 

 warm and clear u^til 5 p. m. Scarcely 

 had I left the town when I heard the 

 trilling of hundreds of Vesper Sparrows 

 but found them scarce half a mile back 

 on the hills. An occasional weak voic- 

 ed old Field Sparrow trilled from some 

 weed top — weak voiced but none the 

 less welcome. From the distant woods 

 came the drumming of a Raffed 

 Grouse. As I approached my first 

 Hawk woods I saw the male sitting on 

 a dead limb in a tall pine and near by 

 the female sat on her nest which con- 

 tained 3 plain eggs so I left them. The 

 nest was 65 feet up an al'riost limbless 

 tree and was lined with a bed of pine 

 sprigs, corn husks, bark chips and few 

 feathers 



In another woods about 3 miles far- 

 ther north I found the second nest with 

 the telltale sprigs of evergreen branches 

 waving over edge ef nest in a basswood 

 about 50 feet up, but it was never used. 

 While sitting on the sunny side of a big 

 tree eating lunch I heard for the first 

 time the melodious "chink" of a Louis- 

 iana Water Thrush. From here I 

 tramped over a mile to see an old nest 

 oi Buteo line.akis —in a. wooAs where I 

 have taken 6 sets in years gone by. 

 This pair had always laid a beautiful 

 set for me by April 13, but at this time 

 only one egg had been laid. The nest 

 was an old one, which had not been 

 fixed up at all— she had merely dug a 

 hole in a mass of dead leaves that filled 

 the nest, so that the egg was half buried 

 but when I visited the nest on April 

 33d I found that she had added a few 

 pine branches, corn stalks, bark strips 

 and chunks of moss, on which lay 3 

 handsome eggs. The female left the 

 nest as I approached and did not utter 



a single cry, which is characteristic of 

 this bird. I called on two other pairs 

 of Red-tails but they had not begun to 

 nest yet. After supper I spent an hour 

 around swamp. About dark a hundred 

 "Whistle wings" went on north in small 

 docks of from 6 to 50. 



C. F. Stone. 

 Branchport, N. Y. 

 {To be continued.) 



Timely and to the Point. 



[Dr. N. expresses our sentiments to a 

 T in the above valuable suggesti ans— 

 with the exception of his '3d" — we boy- 

 cott the wadding and thread" — prefer a 

 good grade of fiuffy cotton and no 

 thread— iiBSne if anything for the outer 

 wrapper. We have lost many a valu- 

 able small egg by perhaps too hasty or 

 careless unwinding of the "thread." — 

 Ed.] 



Mr. Editor:— If you will kindly al- 

 low me a small section of your valuable 

 paper I will endeavor to touch upon a 

 subject that has been sorely neglected 

 on the part of contribufors to oological 

 publications. Nothing is more aggra- 

 vating than to purchase or exchange 

 for fine specimens of eggs and upon te- 

 ceiving them to find a part of one or 

 more sets broken, thereby rendering 

 the set worthless. This catastrophe 

 some will say is the careless handling 

 of packages on the part of postal clerks, 

 etc. Very true, but to them we cannot 

 look for redress. 



The fault lies in every instance with 

 the shipper, with only one exception, 

 and that is where packages containing 

 eggs are sent over the Canadian border. 

 In this case I have found that the over 

 zealous custom officers in searching for 

 dutiable gems, etc., put their fingers 

 through many a rare and costly egg. 

 This has been my experience with a 

 choice set of Accipiter velox, as they 

 were carefully packed and in a rein- 

 forced box. The cover had literally 

 been pried off, contents of box fatally 

 sounded and sent along. In this case I 



