32 
NATURE STUDY. 
to soften the gum and make the record permanent. Then 
leave the specimen in quiet to carryout the process, which 
may require eight or ten hours. Since the spores are pro¬ 
duced mostly upon the sides of the gills, they form, in fall¬ 
ing and adhering to the paper, a beautifully exact image 
of the gills themselves, with all their peculiarities of ar¬ 
rangement, in a manner that a human artist might vainly 
try to equal. So exact is the copy of the gill structure in 
the natural color of the spores, that this mushroom signa¬ 
ture may go far toward revealing the identity of its inter¬ 
esting producer. Sometimes it is found that the spores of 
a particular specimen are so delicate in color that they do 
not show to advantage upon the white surface, in which 
case stiff black paper should be substituted for the white. 
A series of these ‘.‘spore prints” certainly makes a very 
beautiful and valuable collection and, if accompanied with 
full notes concerning the peculiarities of the specimen from 
which each was made, one of real scientific interest. 
Nature Notes. 
BY WIUUIAM H. HUSK. 
Instances have been known of attempts of birds to deco¬ 
rate their nests, but it is not often that robins are included 
among the sestheitic. They must be now, for recently a 
robin’s nest was found with a strip of yellow ribbon seven¬ 
teen inches long and an inch wide, and considerably frayed 
on one edge, loosely bound about the top. The ends were 
securely interwoven with the straw and fine roots. It ap¬ 
parently serves no purpose in the structure of the nest and 
looks like an evident attempt at decoration. 
Nests seem to have been built in strange places this year. 
A robin’s nest on a stone wall was found in May. On June 
6, a brown thrush’s nest was discovered fourteen feet from 
the ground in the interlaced branches of two small red ma¬ 
ples. This is rather an unusual height even for this bird 
which builds in a variety of locations. To match this a 
catbird is now occupying a nest in the top of an apple tree 
about the same distance from the ground. 
