40 The Birds of Albany County 



rearing its young in convenient bird-boxes, while hiemalis is 

 primarily a bird of the wilds, and asks little odds of man and 

 his contrivances. The Winter Wren has much the shorter 

 tail, which is invariably turned over the back and pointed 

 towards the head in a very comical and wren-like manner. 

 Besides, he has a habit of nodding at you, or courtesying, which 

 should serve to identify him at once. 



But the resident of Albany County will not be apt to 

 encounter the difficulty of distinguishing between these two 

 closely allied species, except in early Spring and late Fall. 

 You may look for the Winter Wren in woods along streams, 

 by dark roadsides, and particularly in brush heaps, in and out 

 of which he darts with such rapidity that one's eye must be 

 very sharp to detect him. In an obscure corner of one of 

 these brush heaps, in a cluster of black rootlets, or within a 

 little mossy cavern close to a singing, sylvan stream his nest 

 is placed. In Albany County this very mouse of a bird is 

 only a traveller, on his way from the piney woods of Virginia, 

 to more northern latitudes. I have never seen his nest outside 

 the museum but Chapman says: "Breeds from the Northern 

 States northward, and southward along the Alleghanies to 

 North Carolina." Rarely he is found in Winter as far north 

 as Massachusetts and the lower Hudson Valley. 



A male specimen'^ of this beautiful little creature, now in 

 the State Museum in Albany, I had the good fortime to 

 discover in a wooded spot near the Normanskill, Kenwood, on 



*The lower figure of Plate IV is a por- County, occasionally. At least he has- 



trait of this specimen. Since writing seen them late in Spring in brush 



the above, Mr. H. A. Slack, of Pine heaps. Personally I have not been 



Hills, tells me that it is his opinion able to determine this point, but it 



thattheWmterWrenbreedsinAlbany appears not improbable. 



