RUBY-CROWNED KINGLET. 99 
appear to be incessantly in motion.—I know of no birds more active than these—pre- 
senting the very picture of restless, puny energy, making much ado about nothing.” 
(Dr. Elliott Coues.) 
The Ruby-crowned Kinglet is one of our most exquisite songsters. During spring 
migration, in April and early May, the attentive listener can frequently hear the 
beautiful lay. The notes are clear, very loud and prolonged, full of variety and purity. 
“The Kinglets’ exquisite vocalization,” continues Dr. Coues, ‘‘defies description; we can 
only speak, in general terms, of the power, purity, and volume of the notes, their faultless 
modulation and long continuance. Many doubtless have listened to this music without 
suspecting that the author was the diminutive Ruby-crown, with whose common-place 
utterance, the slender wiry ‘tsip,’ they were already familiar. Such was once the case 
even with Audubon, who pays a heart-felt tribute to the accomplished little vocalist, 
and says further—‘when I tell you, that its song is fully as sonorous as that of the 
Canary-bird, and much richer, I do not come up to the truth, for it is not only as 
powerful and clear, but much more varied and pleasing.’ — This delightful réle is chiefly 
executed during the mating season, and the brief period of exaltation, which precedes 
it, it is consequently seldom heard in regions where the bird does not rear its young, 
except when the little performer breaks forth in song on nearing its summer resort.” 
I have never heard the song in Texas or Missouri, but frequently in central Wis- 
consin, and several times also in northern Illinois, near Chicago. 
Although found at varying periods in all the wooded parts of North America, 
from the Arctic regions to Guatemala, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, its breeding- 
range is chiefly confined to the expanse between the extreme northern border of the United 
States and the Arctic seas, though it also breeds in the higher mountain regions of the 
United States, especially where dense coniferous woods clothe the mountain sides. 
The nesting habits are imperfectly known, as yet. All the nests—only six, to my 
knowledge, having been found so far—have been discovered in the mountain regions of 
Colorado and Montana. The structure is usually semi-pensile, very bulky (about 4x3 
to 4 inches outside), composed of very soft and fine materials, such as fine bark-strips, 
feathers, green moss, lined with hair and feathers. It is usually attached to the 
extremity of a spruce or pine branch, about twenty feet, or more, from the ground. A 
nest, found by Dr. Merrill in the Big Horn Mountains, Montana, on the 18th of June, 
at an elevation of 7,700 feet, was built in a fir tree, about eighteen feet from the 
ground, and placed directly against the trunk, supported by a single branch beneath, 
and by several twigs to which the sides are firmly attached. “It is a very neat, well- 
made structure with thick walls. With the exception of the lining, which consists of 
feathers of the Richardson’s Grouse, well woven into the sides and bottom, the whole 
nest is composed of delicate strips of bark, small pieces of green moss, and fibres of 
weeds, with a few feathers, spiders’ webs, and fragments of a wasp’s nest, the whole 
forming a somewhat globular mass of soft materials. The eggs were eight in number. 
It is not easy to give an accurate idea of the color of these eggs by any description. 
At first sight they appear to be of a uniform dirty cream-color, but a close examination 
shows that in most of the specimens this color is deeper at the larger end, and this 
forms a faint ring.” Other eggs of this species are spotted. One set is described as 
