352 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



into a basket. That is, this bird has used perhaps the 

 strongest fibre which the fields afforded and which most 

 civilized men have not detected. 



Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellow- 

 bird's nest made on the oak at the Island last sum- 

 mer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, 

 some sheep's wool (?), with a fine green moss (ap- 

 parently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, 

 and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglu- 

 tinated together. Some shreds of grape-vine bark about 

 it. Do not know what portion of the whole nest it is. 



[/See also under Flicker, p. 198.] 



MYRTLK WARBLER ; MYRTLE-BIRD 



May 6, 1855. Myrtle-birds very numerous just be- 

 yond Second Division. They sing like an instrument, 

 teee teee te, 1 1 1, 1 1 t, on very various keys, i. e. high 

 or low, sometimes beginning like phe-he. 1 As I sat by 

 roadside one drew near, perched within ten feet, and 

 dived once or twice with a curve to catch the little 

 black flies about my head, coming once within three 

 feet, not minding me much. I could not tell at first 

 what attracted it toward me. It saw them from twenty- 

 five feet off. There was a little swarm of small flies, 

 regularly fly-like with large shoulders, about my head. 

 Many white-throated sparrows there. 



1 [The song that Thoreau heard was, of course, that of the white 

 throated sparrows he saw at the same place. He was long in learning 

 the real authorship of this song, which he at first credited to the chicka- 

 dee and then for several years to the " myrtle-bird."] 



