RUBY-CROWNED WREN. 
83 
exceedingly 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 Roitelet rubis, JDe Buff. v. 373. — Edw. 254 — Lath. Syn. ii. 511 — Arct. 
Zool. 320. — Regulus cristatus alter vertice rubini coloris, Bartram, p. 292. — 
Beale's Museum , No. 7244. 
REG UL US CALEND UL US. — 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 particularly 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 
* See note to Regulus cristatus. 
