356 BULLETIN 17 6, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



frail-] ooking nest, as frequently a now nest is built on the well-pre- 

 served remains of a nest of the previous season. 



The nest seems hardly large enough at first to contain even the 

 small young, but, as the young increase in size, the elastic top ex- 

 pands, as Bayard H. Christy (1932) so gracefully portrays it: "As 

 the young continue to grow a beautiful contrivance comes into play ; 

 the surrounding wall of the nest becomes as it were a living integu- 

 ment about the chicks; it expands with their growth; its rim yields 

 to their little strugglings ; its spliere opens like a flower-bud ; until the 

 little birds, all but ready to take flight, remain resting upon the full- 

 blown corolla." 



Mrs. Bailey (1896) gives the follownng account of the nest build- 

 ing : "The peculiar feature of the building was the quivering motion 

 of the bird in moulding. When the material was placed she moulded 

 the nest like a potter, twirling tremulously around against the sides, 

 sometimes pressing so hard she ruffled up the feathers of her breast. 

 She shaped the cup as if it were a piece of clay. To round the out- 

 side she would sit on the rim and lean over, smoothing the sides with 

 her bill, often with the same tremulous motion. When she wanted 

 to turn around in the nest she lifted herself by whirring her wings." 



In southern Texas this hummingbird sometimes builds its nest at 

 greater heights above the ground than mentioned above; Van Tyne 

 and Sutton (1937) report two such nests found in Brewster County; 

 one was "about twenty feet from the gi-ound on a slender willow 

 branch," and the other was "fully thirty feet from the ground in 

 a gigantic cottonwood." 



James B. Dixon writes to me from Escondido, Calif. : "Like most of 

 the hummingbirds tliey are sometimes found nesting in very unex- 

 pected locations, such as on a porch where doors were swinging 

 open at all hours of the day or night, on a steel rod poked into 

 the roof of a blacksmith shop where men were busy at an anvil, 

 and on an old piece of haywire stuck into a chink in the wall of a 

 barn. Two locations seem to be preferred in the wilder places, the 

 most popular being a long, meandering canyon filled with scrawny 

 sycamores in the bottom and located where the surrounding hill- 

 sides are covered with flowering sage; the other location is in the 

 dense willow thickets, locally known as willow montes, which border 

 running streams or lakes. Here the black-cWnned hummingbird 

 is found breeding in large numbers, and it is not unusual to find 

 a nest on the average of every hundred feet in such locations. 

 I have found as high as three-storied nests of his bird, where appar- 

 ently the bird had returned to the same nest for three successive 

 seasons and built a new nest on the foundations of the previous 

 year's home." 



