RUBY-CROWNED WREN. 83 



ceedingly tame and familiar, and when it wants food or water, 

 utters a continual melancholy and anxious note. It was 

 caught in winter near the North River, thirty or forty miles 

 above New York. 



RUBY-CROWNED WREN. (Sylvia calendula) 



PLATE V.— Fig. 3. 



Le Roitlet rubis, Buff. v. 373.— Edw. 254.— Lath. Syn. ii. 511.— Arct. Zool. 

 320. — Kegulus cristatus alter vertiee rubini eoloris, Bartram, p. 292. — 

 Peale's Museum, No. 7244. 



REGULUS CALEXTDULUS.— Stephens.* 

 Regulus calendulus, Steph. Cont. Sh. Zool. voL x. p. 760. — Bonap. Synop. 91. 



This little bird visits us early in the spring, from the south, 

 and is generally first found among the maple blossoms about 

 the beginning of April. These failing, it has recourse to those 

 of the peach, apple, and other fruit trees, partly for the tops 

 of the sweet and slender stamina of the flowers, and partly for 

 the winged insects that hover among them. In the middle of 

 summer, I have rarely met with these birds in Pennsylvania ; 

 and as they penetrate as far north as the country round 

 Hudson's Bay, and also breed there, it accounts for their late 

 arrival here, in fall. They then associate with the different 

 species of titmouse and the golden-crested wren ; and are par- 

 ticularly numerous in the month of October and beginning of 

 November, in orchards, among the decaying leaves of the apple 

 trees, that at that season are infested with great numbers of 

 small black-winged insects, among which they make great 

 havoc. I have often regretted the painful necessity one is 

 under of taking away the lives of such inoffensive, useful little 

 creatures, merely to obtain a more perfect knowledge of the 

 species ; for they appear so busy, so active, and unsuspecting, 

 as to continue searching about the same twig, even after their 



* See note to Reguhts cristatus. 



