BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO 71 



feet from the ground in a dense thicket of shrubbery and black- 

 berry vines. Three nests were in small white pines, 3 to 4 feet up, 

 in rather open spaces overgrown with various shrubs and small trees 

 near the edges of the woods; the nests were placed on horizontal 

 branches, against the trunk, and well concealed among the dense 

 branches. Near Asquam Lake in New Hampshire I saw two nests 

 in thick clumps of mountain-laurel in some dense and heavy de- 

 ciduous woods, where the land sloped down to the lake; the moun- 

 tain-laurel gi-ew here in extensive patches, but not very high, seldom 

 over 3 or 4 feet; the large and well-made nests were only 2 and 3 

 feet from the ground, but fairly well concealed. 



Some nests of the black-billed cuckoo are very flimsy affairs, but 

 often they are much more substantially built than the nests of the 

 yellow-billed cuckoo. Owen Durfee describes in his notes a well- 

 made nest that he found in a clump of chinquapin oaks near a road 

 in Rehoboth, Mass. It was made of oak twigs and dry fern stalks, 

 many of the twigs being fresh, with leaves attached ; it was lined with 

 dry oak leaves and a few fresh ones. It measured 8 inches in outside 

 diameter and 3 by 3% inches in inside diameter, being hollowed to a 

 depth of 1 inch. There is a beautiful nest in the Thayer collection, 

 taken from a thicket in Lancaster, Mass., 7 feet from the ground; 

 it has a well-made foundation of coarse twigs, tufts of grass, and 

 burs ; and it is profusely lined with the green leaves and the cottony 

 catkins of the poplar. S. F. Rathbun writes to me of an interesting 

 nest that he found: "The nest was a saucer-shaped affair made en- 

 tirely of the burs from the burdock plant, simply stuck together so as 

 to form a shallow receptacle for the eggs. As a lining for the nest 

 a few dry grasses were used, and the burs with the grasses repre- 

 sented the entire structure. The cuckoo certainly showed ingenuity 

 when it made this nest, for it could not have been more simply or 

 easily constructed." 



Dr. T. C. Stephens has sent me some fine photographs (pi. 8) of 

 a black-billed cuckoo's nest taken at the base of a willow sapling, near 

 the shore of Lake Goodenough, in Union County, S. Dak., and says: 

 "I have observed a rather marked tendency for the black-billed cuckoo 

 in this region to build its nest within a very few inches of the ground 

 or on the ground. This nest in the photograph was several inches 

 above the ground outside the clump, but it might be regarded as a 

 ground nest, because there was quite an accumulation of dirt and 

 weed growth immediately below it. Of course, I have found nests 

 of this species at heights about level with a man's eyes, also." 



A. Dawes DuBois has sent me the data for eight nests of this cuckoo, 

 as found by him in Tompkins County, N. Y., and Hennepin County, 

 Minn. Two of them were 5 feet above ground, one in the top of a 

 bush covered with grape vines on the steep slope of a ravine and the 



