and rearing their offspring as they did when only the 

 American Indian was the species of mankind which 

 they must fear. 



Here also I have spent unnumbered days and even 

 weeks observing these and the numerous other feath- 

 ered sylvan residents and visitors during each sum- 

 mer for the past decade and have located during this 

 period over two hundred homes of this rather tropical- 

 like bird. 



During the past season (1914) it was my good for- 

 tune to find three homes on the horizontal branches 

 of the oak within a radius of two hundred feet in a 

 small valley on the western slope of Federal Hill 

 near the Village of Bloomingdale. 



The males of this species appeared first in this sec- 

 tion this )^ear on May 10th, which is about three full 

 days behind their usual arrival date. Each succeed- 

 ing day thereafter brought its quota of new arrivals 

 from the sunny South until on May 30th they had be- 

 come quite common and the males were singing on 

 most every side among the hills. 



The females appeared about May 25th and by the 

 8th of June the pairs had mated and were all busy 

 looking for homesites. The three nests about which 

 this sketch is built were constructed between June 9th 

 and 15th and on June 22nd all contained four eggs 

 each and the process of incubation commenced. The 

 eggs of all the nests were uniform in size and averaged 

 .94 x .66 and were greenish blue irregularly specked 

 with brown and indistinct and translucent patches of 

 pearly grey. The process of incubation was in each 

 case performed by the females wholly, the males al- 



