14 Joint Bulletin 8 



At the beginning of a recent attack of this collecting fever I 

 took considerable interest in obtaining a good representative series of 

 eggs of the red-winged blackbird. This bird being fairly common 

 and its eggs showing wide variation, the result was quite successful 

 and led to other matters along zoological lines as you shall see. 



In the search for locations of red-wings' nests my friend and I 

 were discussing where to try next, and he remarked incidentally that 

 30 years before a small boy had brought him a hat-full of rail's eggs, 

 which he claimed to have found in a small swamp near Hartland. This 

 looked encouraging to us for both red-wings and rails, and so we 

 went to the locality. The finding of the small swamp was not so easy 

 as might have been expected. Neither of us had ever been there 

 before and the information was 30 years old and rather sketchy. 

 Finally, however, we found the swamp typically located in a rolling 

 meadow and not more than 200 feet long and 100 wide. Upon our ap- 

 proach about a dozen red-wings started into the air with their usual 

 clatter and assured us of a chance to examine some of their nests, at 

 least. In fact, we found five red-wings' nests, each containing from one 

 to five young birds. 



This was all well enough so far as it went; but we were anxious 

 to solve the rail problem and made a careful search of the whole 

 swamp with this in mind. The reward was a nest containing one ad- 

 dled egg of the Virginia rail. As we gathered about the nest strange 

 squawking noises greeted us and later a glimpse or two of the funny 

 little rails dodging here and there among the reeds. My first impres- 

 sion was of a lively little toy duck swimming about. There appeared 

 to be only one pair of rails breeding here and this condition had doubt- 

 less obtained for upwards of 30 years. We watched these strange, 

 shy little birds for a short time, but refrained from disturbing them 

 much for fear that they wouldn't come back the next season. 



Within a few miles of this swamp is a larger one covering nearly 

 20 acres. We visited this and found in it countless red-wings' nests 

 in all stages, from incomplete nests to those containing well fledged 

 young. This swamp, situated about 500 feet from a main highway 

 and quite near a village, is composed of large areas of tussock grass 

 growing in from one to four feet of water and furnishing most un- 

 certain footing. These areas are interspersed with small tracts of 

 low-growing bushes, with here and there a bit of open water. A great 

 confusion of sounds accompanied us through the swamp as frogs, red- 

 wings, swamp sparrows, rails and possibly other creatures were dis- 



