WALNUTS AS A COSMETIC But birds sometimes rub foreign substances over their feathers--just why we don't know. Grackles have been known to use the acid juice of green walnuts in preening. In Pennsylvania starlings have been seen to come to walnut trees when the nuts were almost three-quarters grown, in June, and peck a hole in the sticky hull of a nut, clip the bill into it, undoubtedly wetting the bill against the pulpy interior, and then thrust the bill into their plumage. They did this from June to August, especially on hot, dry summer days, but some birds continued this even during light rain. Some years before the above was recorded, when this sort of thing was less known, Edward Howe Forbush, noted ornithologist, cautiously used a similar record in his classical _Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States_. He writes that his colleague, J. N. Baskett, says he saw a bluejay lift its wing and rub pungent walnut leaves repeatedly into the feathers beneath. BEER AND MOTH BALLS Since then such things have been recorded a number of times, including a catbird that anointed its feathers with a leaf and a grackle that found a moth ball and, holding this in its bill, rubbed it against the underside of its spread wing and the side of its body. After several applications the grackle dropped the moth ball and preened its feathers; then again it picked up the moth ball and treated the other wing as well as its belly. Recent experiments with tame song sparrows have shown that they may use beer, orange juice, vinegar, and other things made available to them in dressing their plumage, and it appears that this may be correlated with a little-understood type of activity known as anting, in which live ants are placed on the feathers. TRAVELING BIRDS' NESTS [Illustration] In spring and fall many of our birds make long journeys under their own power, some of the most publicized being the migration of the Arctic tern, a bird that may spend the northern summer north of the Arctic Circle and, before returning there next season, may have visited south of the Antarctic Circle. The golden plover that makes a nonstop flight to Hawaii is another famous traveler, and many of our smaller songbirds are no mean travelers either. The barn swallow that nests about an Illinois farm in the summer may spend the winter in Argentina. The tiny hummingbirds' feat of crossing the Gulf of Mexico nonstop is worthy of mention too. Such travels have become commonplace through familiarity. We have come to accept even the possibility of occasional transatlantic passages of small perching birds, helped by transatlantic vessels, and of such birds as starlings, making their way from place to place by boxcar.