Destruction of Birds by Cold. 
The past three weeks have been very wet and 
cold, with frost three times and snow once. 
May 31, in the morning, there was about two 
inches of snow, and still snowing, and changed 
to cold rain about 10 o’clock and rained all 
day. Saturday morning cold and cloudy, and 
the thermometer very near the freezing point. 
At a friend’s place where I go fishing, etc., 
there were about one hundred pairs of Martin s 
and Tree Swallows breeding, and on Satur- 
day morning they were nearly all dead; the 
children showed me many of them. My 
friend says he took seven dead Martins in one 
box, nine under another. Other boxes, not 
easy to get at, were full of dead ones, and they 
could be seen partly out of the holes. He 
told me that at a railroad bridge, near Chester, 
he could have picked up a bushel basket of 
dead Cliff Swallows. 
He goes after his mail in a boat about three 
miles, and on that morning he saw two Least 
Bitterns dead by their nests, picked up young 
ducks so cold they could not swim, which died 
in the boat before he got home. 
The children brought me a Least Bittern j 
that they found sitting on a boat so cold it 
could not fly, which they warmed and fed. It 
was too soiled for skinning so I let it go; it ran ! 
off to the marsh. 
May 24, I got two Hudsonian Godwits here, 
and saw a White Pelican. 
June 7, I got a Black Tern that is white un- 
der around the neck and from the bill to nearly 
even with the eyes. The back and top of the 
head the usual color of the back. There is no 
other Tern that will answer that description, is 
there? 
That makes the eighth specimen that is 
white and partly white, all collected by my- 
self or for mo, I have in my collection. 
Velas Hatch. 
Oak Centre, Wis. 
O &Q. XIV. Aug. 1889 p. 122 
Progne subis. — Mr. A. H. Kirkland, late entomologist to the Massachu- 
setts State Board of Agriculture, informs me that while observing the rav- 
ages of the fire-worm ( Rhopobota vacciniana Pack.) in the cranberry bogs 
of Plymouth and Barnstable counties, he found the Purple Martins feeding 
freely on the imagos of the pest. The Martins were abundant at many of 
the bogs, a Martin box on a pole being, according to Mr. Kirkland, “ap- 
parently as much a necessary adjunct to a well-regulated bog as a dyke or 
a cranberry house.” 
As two broods of the imagos of the fire-worm are on the wing during 
the summer, and as the female imagos are most active before laying their 
eggs, the benefits accruing to the cranberry grower from the presence of 
the Martins are obvious. Mr. Kirkland states that the cranberry growers 
estimate that in a term of years they lose fifty per cent of their crops 
because of the damage done by injurious insects, chief among which is 
the fire-worm. 
Auk, XVIII, Oct., i.90iV'p~: 35£ 
