PROFESSIONAL FLY-CATCHING 



pear tree, about a dozen feet up. I secured the picture 

 of the mother bird incubating by standing on a step- 

 ladder with my reflecting camera and the big lens, 

 having a young lady throw light upon the subject, not 

 by means of her discourse or countenance, but by a 

 mirror which reflected a sunbeam upon the shaded nest. 



All my life until the past June I had never been able 

 to find the nest of the Alder Flycatcher — which is a 

 recent name for the eastern form of the species long 

 known as Traill's Flycatcher. A friend of mine in a 

 town not far from where I live, at a higher elevation, 

 finding this interesting little bird quite common there, 

 invited me to visit him and see the rare flycatcher and 

 its nesting. They are late breeders, seldom laying 

 before the middle of June, and I did not go till the 

 twenty-seventh. 



The bird is known to be one of the most timid and 

 secretive of the smaller species and to frequent alder 

 swamps. I had always supposed that the place to 

 look for it was in dense alder thickets, so I was quite 

 surprised when my friend conducted me into a moist 

 pasture where there were only scattered branches of 

 low alder bushes, most of them not over a yard high. 

 In one of these he had located a nest some days before, 

 in process of building. Here it was now, only a foot 

 from the ground, with one pretty, pinkish egg with 

 reddish spots around the larger end — a neat nest, not 

 unlike that of the Chestnut-sided Warbler. The owner 

 did not appear. 



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