322 NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS. 



their movements, ever constantly and hnrriedly changing their positions in 

 flight. As they lly, they are able to check their speed suddenly, and to turn 

 at the smallest iiuiiginahle angle. At times they move off in a straight 

 line, gliding with motionless wings from one tree to another. When one de- 

 scends to pick an insect from the surface of the water, it has the appearance 

 of tuml)ling, and, in rising again, ascends with a singular motion of the wings, 

 as if luirled into the air and endeavoring to recover itself 



In tlie manner in which the male of this species will perch (m the top of 

 some lofty tree, and from that vantage-height scream defiance to all around 

 him, and pursue any large bird that approaches, as described by jMr. Hill, 

 all the audacity and courage of our Kingbird is exhibited. At the approacli 

 of a Vulture or a Hawk, he starts off in a horizontal line, after rising in 

 the air to the same height as his adversary, and, hovering over him for 

 a moment, descends upon the intruder's back, rising and sinking as lie 

 repeats his attack, and shiieking all the while. In these attacks he is 

 always triumpliant. 



This Fh'catclier is also charged by "Mr. Hill with seizing upon the Hum- 

 ming-Birds as they hover over the blossoms in the garden, killing its prey 

 by repeated blows struck on the branch, and then devouring them. 



The nest, according to Mr. Hill, is seldom found in any other tree than 

 that of the palm kind. Among the web of fibres around the footstalk of 

 each branch the nest is woven of cotton-wool and grass. The eggs, he adds, 

 are four or five, of an ivory color, blotched with deep purple spots, inter- 

 mingled with brown specks, the clusters thickening at the greater end. Mr. 

 Gosse, on the contrary, never found the nest in a palm. One, taken from 

 an upper limb of a bitterwood-tree that grew close to a friend's door, at no 

 great height, was a cup made of the stalks and tendrils of a small passion 

 flower, the spiral tendrils very prettily arranged around the edge, and very 

 neatly and thickly lined with black horse-hair. The other, made in a .spondias 

 bush, was a rather loose structure, smaller and less compact, almost entirely 

 composed of tendrils, with no horse-hair, but a few shining black frond-ribs 

 of a fern. 



Mr. j\Iarch states that the migrant birds of this species return to Jamaica 

 about the last of March, gradually disperse, and, like the resident birds, oc- 

 cupy their selected trees in solitary pairs, and immediately set about prepar- 

 ing their nests. At St. Catharine's the first nest found was on the 14tli of 

 April, and the latest in the middle of July. They seldom build in the tree 

 in which they perch, but select a lower tree near it. Some make their nests 

 high, others low, usually at the extremity of a lateral branch. He describes 

 tliem as loose structures of twigs and the stems of trailing plants, with the 

 cup of grass, horse-hair, and vegetable fibre. The eggs are three, rarely 

 four, of a long oval, with a ground of liglit creani-colnr, dashed around the 

 larger end more or less thickly with blotches of burnt sienna, and with 

 cloudings of pale bistre underneath. 



