YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO 55 



needles, and mosses of different kinds. These materials are loosely placed on 

 the top of the little platform, which is frequently so small that the extremities 

 of the bird project on both sides, and there is scarcely any depression to keep 

 the eggs from rolling out even in only a moderate windstorm, unless one of the 

 parents sits on the nest, and it is therefore not a rare occurrence to find 

 broken eggs lying under the trees or bushes in which the nests are placed. 

 Some of these are so slightly built that the eggs can be readily seen through the 

 bottom. An average nest measures about 5 inches in outer diameter by 11/2 

 inches in depth. They are rarely placed over 20 feet from the ground, generally 

 from 4 to 8 feet upon horizontal limbs of oak, beech, gum, dogwood, hawthorn, 

 mulberry, pine, cedar, fir, apple, orange, fig, and other trees. Thick bushes par- 

 ticularly such as are overrun with wild grape and other vines as well as hedge- 

 rows, especially those of osage orange are most frequently selected for nesting 

 sites. The nests are ordinarily well concealed by the overhanging and surround- 

 ing foliage and while usually shy and timid at other times, the Yellow-billed 

 Cuckoo is generally courageous and bold in the defense of its chosen home ; the 

 bird on the nest not unfrequently will raise its feathers at right angles from the 

 body and occasionally even fly at the intruder. 



Of five Massachusetts nests, on which I have notes, the lowest was 

 only 2 feet above the ground in some bushes, and the highest was 12 

 feet up in a crotch near the top of an oak sapling in a swampy- 

 thicket near a brook. Owen Durfee mentions in his notes a nest 5 

 feet up in a juniper on the edge of a swamp. The others were at 

 low elevations in thickets along brooks. 



A. D. DuBois has sent me his notes on five Illinois nests; one of 

 these was on the end of a branch of an apple tree, 8 feet from the 

 ground, near a country schoolhouse ; this nest contained 3 eggs of the 

 cuckoo and a robin's egg. Another was near the end of a branch 

 in an osage-orange hedge, 10 feet up ; still another was in an isolated 

 clump of willows, between a field and a pasture, 6 feet from the 

 ground. 



But cuckoos do not always nest in such low situations; there are 

 several records of their nesting well up in elm trees. Grant Foreman 

 (1924) tells of a pair that nested on his place in Muskogee, Okla., 

 for one or two years, high up in an elm tree ; he says : "The next year 

 after nesting in this inaccessible place, they built their nest in a little 

 elm tree in the parking, in a low limb overhanging the curb on an 

 asphalt street where hundreds of automobiles were passing every day, 

 and here in this exposed, noisy place they raised a brood of young. 

 This year they built their nest in a little hackberry tree in the park- 

 ing along the side of my lot; but here also the nest was on a low 

 limb overhanging the curb on a paved street, and the ice wagon 

 stopped every morning directly under this nest, which was so low 

 down that the driver might have put his hand in it." 



George Finlay Simmons (1915) mentions a nest that he found 

 near Houston, Tex., on the horizontal limb of a young pine near the 

 edge of some woods. He says of it : "The nest was a slight platform 



