NATURE NOTES FROM ACADIA

NOTES FROM THE FIELD

Pine Grosbeaks. - Throughout December, the most approachable birds in Acadia National Park were Pine Grosbeaks. Time and again people wanted to know the name of these confiding heavy-bodied birds which, in a few weeks' time and along with appreciable help from the Starlings, stripped the orange fruit from almost every Mountain Ash in the town of Bar Harbor. The Pine Grosbeak is a most welcome winter visitor with us, coming from the extensive far-northern forests. The rosy-red plumage of the handsome male birds is especially attractive in the winter sunshine. Females and immature males are slaty-gray and have the crown, upper tail-coverts, and breast washed with olive yellow. Seeds, wild fruits, and the buds of coniferous trees are their commonest items of food.

- A. S.

An Early Winter. - By mid-November our winter had come to stay, and before the first of December, the Moon of the Long Night, a considerable amount of snow had fallen. December proved to be one of the coldest twelfth-months on record, the temperature going below zero on at least six days. On the 28th the mercury tumbled to 10° below zero, on the 29th it was at a record low of 27° below, and on the 30th the reading was 22° below in Bar Harbor. Snow fell on at least 10 of the 31 days. Flocks of Crows and Herring Gulls, driven by hunger, kept flying low over the town, occasionally settling in streets and yards where some food was to be had. Heavy freezing over of the inter-tidal region inflicted considerable hardship on these beach-combers.

- A. S.

Red Squirrel. - One of the Red Squirrels (Sciurus hudsonicus) living in the spruce forest in the region above Anemone Cave had just put the finishing touches to its compact ball-shaped outside nest before winter's early blasts blew out of the north. This nest was saddled well out on the dense limbs of a spruce at some distance from the ground. Made largely of the soft, spongy, light-green Usnea lichen ("moss," to the layman) and surrounded by dense, close-growing conifers, it appeared to be a warm and habitable winter retreat. Perhaps it is because of the scarcity of hollow trees on the island that our Red Squirrels so frequently construct these globular outside nests.

- A. S.