small nest was excavated, then lined with a quantity of fine horsehair and fin- 

 ished with an interior bed of soft cowhair. The season proving wet and stormy, 

 the nest in this novel situation fell over, but was carried, with the young, to a 

 safe situation near the piazza of the house, where the parents now fed and reared 

 their brood. In an apple tree in another garden a nest of this bird w^as made 

 chiefly of loose white cotton strings which had been used for training up some 

 raspberry bushes, and looked as white and conspicuous as a snowball. Sometimes 

 they condescend to the familiarity of picking up the sweepings of the seamstress, 

 such as thread, yarn, sewing silk, fine shreds of cotton stockings, and bits of lace 

 and calico — and it is not uncommon to observe hasty disputes between our little 

 architects and the Baltimore Orioles, as the latter sometimes seize and tug upon 

 the lose or flowing ends and strings of the unfinished nest, to the great annoyance 

 of the legitimate operators. 



The labor of forming the nest seems often to devolve on the female. On 

 the tenth of May 1 observed one of these industrious matrons busily engaged with 

 her fabric in a low barberry bush, and by the evening of the second dav the 

 whole was completed, to the lining which was made, at length, of hair and willow 

 down, of which she collected and carried mouthfuls so large that she often ap- 

 peared almost like a mass of flying cotton. She far exceeded in industry her 

 active neighbor, the Baltimore Oriole, who was also engaged in collecting the same 

 materials. Notwithstanding this industry the completion of the nest, with this 

 and other small birds, is sometimes strangely protracted or not immediately re- 

 fiuired. Yet occasionally I have found the eggs of this species improvidently 

 laid on the ground. They are usually about four or five, of a dull white, thickly 

 sprinkled near the great end with various sized specks of pale brown. 



It is amusing to observe the sagacity of this little bird in disposing of tlie 

 eggs of the vagrant and parasitic cow troupial. The egg, deposited before the 

 laying of the rightful tenant, too large for ejectment, is ingeniously incarcerated 

 in the bottom of the nest, and a new lining placed above it, so that it is never 

 hatched to prove the dragon of the brood. Two instances of this kind were ob- 

 served by my friend Air. Charles Pickering ; and once I obtained a nest with 

 the adventitious egg about two-thirds Iniried, the upper edge only being visible, 

 so that in many instances it is probable that this species escapes from the un- 

 pleasant imposition of becoming a nurse to the sable orphan of the Cowbird. She. 

 however, acts faithfully the part of a foster ]iarent when the egg is laid a;fter 

 her own. 



Two instances have been reported to me in which three of the ^'elKl\\• W'arb- 

 ler's own eggs were covered along with that of the Cowbird. In a third, after a 

 (oubird's egg had been thus concealed, a second was laid, which was similarly 

 treated, thus finally giving rise to a three-storied nest. 



The Yellow Warbler, to attract attention from its nest, when sitting, or 

 when the nest contains young, sometimes feigns lameness, hanging its tail ami 

 liea<I and fluttering feebly along in the ])ath of the spectator: at other times, when 



10.^ 



