Page:The Singing Tree - William Henry Mousley - The Auk 36(3) - P0339-p0348.pdf/9

Vol. XXXVI 1919 notes proceeding from a tall maple tree; and it was not long before I flushed the female Olive-backed Thrush (already referred to) from her nest and four eggs, which were situated in a small hemlock tree only seven yards from where the male had been heard.

At that supreme moment I was only eight yards from the nest of the Bay-breasted Warbler yet failed to detect it. Then I worked round to the west, where a Black-throated Green Warbler was singing from the top of a tall elm tree, and later on the female was flushed from her set of four eggs, just fourteen yards from the 'singing tree' of the male. At any other time three nests and two of them Warblers in three hours, I should have considered as out of the common, but in the present instance I paid no attention to the matter whatever, my thoughts all being centred on the greater prize.

The best part of another hour however went by and still no results, so I decided to have another good look to the south, as the actions of the male convinced me the nest was in that direction. Incidentally also I wanted to get the particulars relating to the nest of the Olive-backed Thrush, and it was whilst engaged with this that a bird flew to the back of me and alighted in a small fir tree. Turning sharply round I noticed she was the female Bay-breasted Warbler, and almost directly she went to her nest, notwithstanding that I was in full view of her and only eight yards away. The nest was in the top of a small fir tree, nine feet from the ground and three feet from the top of the tree, and placed close against the trunk. It contained a set of four slightly incubated eggs. I had passed it several times that afternoon without noticing it, but no one familiar with the nests of warblers will be surprised at this admission. So beautifully do they seem to blend with their surroundings that they seem to be part and parcel of them, and it is no easy matter sometimes to detect a nest, although comparatively in an exposed position as this one was, just five-thirty P.M. when I found it, and within the magic circle too, it being exactly sixteen yards from the 'singing tree' of the male, which I first noticed at one-thirty P.M., so that I had spent exactly four hours with this bird, during which time he sang almost continuously, with only short intervals of rest in between. This species as well as the Blackburnian and Black-throated Blue