190 FRANCIS H. HERRICK 



Swinging pendulous nests are seldom concealed, their position 

 alone usually offering a sufficient guarantee of protection. In 

 certain of the weavers of Madagascar and the East, hundreds of 

 such nests are sometimes suspended from the same tree, which 

 is often resorted to for years ; again social weavers often hang 

 their nests under the thatch of houses, and to find one nest 

 suspended to another is not rare. The remarkable nest of the 

 Indian weaver {Ploceus baya) is entered from below, and through 

 a peculiar woven tube, which is carried several inches from 

 beneath the body of the nest itself, and may even become com- 

 pounded by the addition of successive chambers " infraimposed," 

 or added from below. (See section 2.) 



Increment nests of whatever type, may be canopied by some 

 sort of a protecting shield, with entrance at the side or from 

 below. In the singular nest of the South American oven 

 bird, to mention an extreme case, the whole is a substantial 

 chamber of mud, weighing eight or nine pounds, evenly 

 smoothed and domed without, and with winding entrance 

 passage opening at a point considerably below the cavity re- 

 served for the eggs. 



Do birds which commonly build from a basal support ever 

 display a tendency to suspend their nest from the side or from 

 above? As a rule they certainly do not, so far as recorded obser- 

 vations admit of any conclusions ; in some cases they apparently 

 do, as in tailor birds and certain species of the hummingbird 

 family. There are cases in which the answer would appear 

 to depend upon a definition of terms, with perhaps the split- 

 ting of hairs at that. Accordingly we shall find the tailor bird 

 and the parula warbler, at times at least (/, b, 2, b') occupying 

 pendent nests which are secondarily adaptive, or where the 

 suspension is directly furnished by some natural objects such 

 as lichens or leaves. The nest of this warbler (fig. 6) is certainly 

 suspended, but it is simply made by slightly adapting a sus- 

 pended body, in this instance by sewing together the free ends 

 of a cluster of usnea lichen with rootlets. The tailor bird com- 

 monly draws together the edges of one or more leaves and 

 stitches them in the form of a suspensory pocket, which is filled 

 with cotton down and other soft substances and presumably 

 molded after the common method; yet at other times it is said 

 to make use of natural supports in the more usual way. 



