Older COCCYGES. 



Family ( LCULID^. 



COCCYZUS AMERICANUS (L.). (387.) 

 YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO. 



This widely distributed species had escaped my observation 

 long after the Black-billed Cuckoo had become exceedingly 

 familiar to me here, but in the spring of 1867 I met with a 

 pair on the 30th of April, in some brushland bordering the 

 heavy timber within a mile of the Mississippi river at Min- 

 neapolis. Having secured them both, I made exceptional 

 efforts to find others, which however proved unavailing, and I 

 was thus left to the presumption that they were probably 

 stragglers until the next year, when to my great joy, I found 

 them again on the 14th of May, in the timber but a short dis- 

 tance from one of our small, beautiful lakes, not two miles 

 from where I first saw the others a year earlier. This time 

 they were breeding. The nest, constructed of dry sticks, 

 loosely interwoven and covered with some moss and catkins 

 from the blossoming trees, was placed on a horizontal limb of 

 an oak about seven feet from the ground. It contained four 

 greenish-blue eggs. 



From that time until the present, I have see them at irregu- 

 lar intervals, but it is not a common species in any section I 

 have personally explored. 



A friend of mine, much interested in the habits of familiar 

 species, had the fortune to secure a nest at Lake Minnetonka, 

 under very simular circumstances, a year later. Mr. Lewis 

 says of this species, "Common at Pelican lake. Becker 

 county." He was familiar with the Black-billed Cuckoo, and 

 could scarcely have been mistaken between the two birds. Mr. 

 Howling as well as several others of our taxidermists have had 

 specimens in their collections from time to time. They are 



