Twentieth Annual Meeting. , 13 



I did not find them upon the Pacific slope, nor upon the high mountain lands. They 

 are social in habits, going in couples, and generally in flocks of from ten to fifty or 

 more. They are noisy, their voice harsh, coarse and discordant; an indescribable 

 jargon — even their whistling notes are not musical. In their food habits they are 

 omnivorous, but seem to prefer fruits and berries, often doing great damage on the 

 plantations when the bananas, plantains and mangoes are ripening. For breeding 

 purposes they select large thorny trees, in an open space where the limbs of other 

 trees do not touch, so as to be beyond the reach of reptiles, monkeys, raccoons, and 

 other climbing nest-robbers. 



Their pendulous, gourd-shaped nests are strongly and ingeniously woven and sus- 

 pended to the ends of the boughs of the tallest branches, and are made of fibrous 

 etrippings from plants and from frond-like leaves, with here and there a rootlet. The 

 bottoms are lined with leaves. Some writers state that the birds build their nests of 

 grasses, but I have been unable to find any in those that I have examined, and I am 

 inclined to think this large species rarely, if ever, use it, and if they do the blades, 

 so brittle when dry, must be of a very strong, hemp-like nature, to long sustain the 

 weight of the nest and its occupants against the wear and tear of the storms and 

 winds. 



The entrance is a purse-like slit at the top; the average length of the nest, about 

 three feet; in diameter, at the rounded base, nine to ten inches. I have never found 

 less than five nor more than twenty-one nests in a tree; they are said, however, to 

 build as many as fifty, and even more, but the late growing demand in the States for 

 bananas causes the producers, heretofore so indifferent and indolent, to be more watch- 

 ful, and the large colonies of the birds are fast thinning out. The only eggs that have 

 <5ome under my observation I collected March 13th, 1887, at Cayo, a small village on 

 the Balize river, in British Honduras, and near its western boundary-line. There 

 were thirteen nests in the tree (a species of locust); these were all hanging from the 

 boughs of one branch, from two to three feet apart, and at least seventy-five feet 

 from the ground, but the dense undergrowth, a tangled mass of young palms, bushes 

 and vines, buoyed up the tree in its fall like a cushion, so that, to my surprise, I was 

 able to save unbroken three sets of fresh eggs, two in each nest; and as the same 

 number of the broken eggs were found in the other nests, together with the further 

 fact that the nests were not large enough to rear over a pair of the birds, I think it 

 safe to enter two eggs as a full set; and I am also led to believe, from the great dif- 

 ference in the dimensions of the eggs and in the size of the male and female birds (see 

 measurements given below), that they are hatched in pairs, and as they go in couples, 

 remain together during life. 



First set: 1.49x1.10, 1.42x.96; ground color bluish white, thinly speckled and spot- 

 ted with brownish black, and dark purple stains. 



Second set: 1.49x1.08, 1.40x1.00; ground color bluish white, clouded and marbled 

 with pale rusty brown, and a few zigzag, hair-like streaks of a darker tint, the cloud- 

 ing thickest upon the largest egg. 



Third set: 1.50x1.03, 1.40x.98; the first bluish white, without mark or stain (an ab- 

 normal egg); the others peckled and spotted thinly with pale rusty brown, and a few 

 faint purple stains. 



The broken eggs examined were all specked and spotted with either brownish 

 black or pale rusty brown in marked contrast, the coloring matter by sets, however, 

 largely alike. 



A pair of the birds which I shot and mounted in the winter of 1886, at Santa Tomas, 



Ouatemala, measure as follows: stretch 



of 

 Sex. Length. 



Female 16.50 



Male 22.00 



