CAKOLINA PARAKEET 5 



accounts were rather fantastic. For example, Wilson (1832) wrote: 

 "One man assured me that he cut down a large beech tree, which was 

 hollow, and in which he found the broken fragments of upwards of 

 twenty parakeets' eggs, which were of a greenish yellow colour. 

 The nests, though destroyed in their texture by the falling of the 

 tree, appeared, he said, to be formed of small twigs glued to each 

 other, and to the side of the tree, in the manner of the Chimney 

 Swallow." Audubon (1842) says: "Their nest, or the place in which 

 they deposit their eggs, is simply the bottom of such cavities in trees 

 as those to which they usually retire at night. Many females deposit 

 their eggs together." 



Maynard (1896) was told by some cedar hunters that a large num- 

 ber of parakeets nested in a hollow in a huge cypress tree in the 

 depths of a great cypress swamp. He offered them a good sum to 

 procure the eggs, which they attempted to do; but, on opening the 

 tree, about which they saw a large number of the parakeets, they were 

 disappointed to find only young birds. H. B. Bailey (1883) had in 

 his collection a set of two eggs, which he felt sure were eggs of the 

 Carolina parakeet. "The eggs, which were taken April 26, 1855, 

 were deposited in a hollow tree, on the chips at bottom. One of them 

 was sent to Mr. Ridgway who has kindly compared it with identified 

 eggs, and who confirms the identification." There was an appar- 

 ently authentic set in the John Lewis Childs (1906b) collection, 

 taken in the wild, of which he writes : 



The set consists of three eggs which were taken on April 2, 1896, by Dr. H. E. 

 Peudry. They were found in a cavity of a sycamore tree forty feet up on the 

 outskirts of the Great Swamp near the head of the Caloosahatchee River and 

 west of Lake Okechobee, De Soto County, Florida. Dr. Pendry was not sure 

 of the identity of these eggs, as he saw no Paroquets at the nest, but they were 

 in the swamp and he had frequently seen and taken young birds in the same 

 locality. * * * The eggs were sent to us for identification, and there seems 

 to l)e not the slightest doubt but that they are genuine. They measure as 

 follows : 1.35 X 1.06-1.26 x 1.06, 1.25' x 1.05 [34.3 by 27.1, 32.1 by 27.1, and 31.8 

 by 26.8 millimeters]. 



William Brewster (1889) published the following account, which 

 seemed to him "to rest on evidence sufficiently good to warrant its 

 publication." He questioned everybody he met about the nesting of 

 the parakeet and was told by two professional hunters of alligators 

 and plume birds that they had "seen Parrakeets' nests, which they 

 described as flimsy structures built of twigs and placed on the 

 branches of cypress trees." He goes on to say : 



This account was so widely at variance with what has been previously recorded 

 regarding the manner of nesting of this species that I considered it, at the time, 

 as a mere fabrication, but afterwards it was unexpectedly and most strongly 

 corroborated by Judge R. L. Long of Tallahassee. The latter gentleman, who, 

 by the way, has a very good general knowledge of the birds of our Northern 



