108 Coues on the Have, Cliff, or Crescent Svmllow. 



It may be remembered in this connection that a happy conjunc- 

 tion of circumstances is required to satisfy these birds. Not only 

 are cliffs or their substitutes necessary, but these must be situated 

 where clayey mud, possessing some degree of adhesiveness and plas- 

 ticity, can be procured. The indication is met at large in the "West, 

 along unnumbered streams, where the birds most do congregate ; 

 and their very general dispersion in the West, as compared with 

 their rather sporadic distribution in the East, is thus readily 

 explained. The great veins of the West, — the Missouri, the Co- 

 lumbia, and the Colorado, — and most of their venous tributaries, 

 returning the humors from the clouds to their home in the sea, are 

 supplied in profusion with animated congregations of the Swallows, 

 often vastly more extensive than those gatherings of the feathered 

 Sons of Temperance beneath our eaves, where the sign of the order 

 — a bottle, neck downward — is set for our edification. 



All are familiar, doubtless, with the architecture of these masons; 

 if any be not, the books will remove their ignorance. But there 

 are many interesting details, perhaps insufficiently elucidated in our 

 standard treatises. It is generally understood that the most per- 

 fect nest, that is, a nest fully finished and furnished with a neck, 

 resembling a decanter tilted over, — that such a " bottle-nosed " 

 or "retort-shaped" nest is the typical one, indicating the primitive 

 fashion of building. But I am by no means satisfied of this. Re- 

 membering that the Swallows are all natural hole-breeders, we may 

 infer that their early order of architecture was a wall, rampart, or 

 breastwork, which defended and, perhaps, enlarged a natural cavity 

 on the face of a cliff. Traces of such work are still evident enough 

 in those frequent instances in which they take a hole in a wall, 

 such as one left by a missing brick, and cover it in, either with a 

 regular domed vestibule or a mere cup-like rim of mud. It was 

 probably not until they had served a long apprenticeship that they 

 acquired the sufficient skill to stick anest against a perfectly smooth, 

 vertical support. Some kind of domed nest was still requisite, to 

 carry out the idea of hole breeding, a trait so thoroughly ingrained 

 in llirundine nature, and implying perfect covering for the eggs ; 

 and the indication is fully met in one of the very commonest tonus 

 of nest, namely, a hemispherical affair, quite a "breastwork" in 

 fact, with a hole at the most protuberant part, or just below it. 

 The running on of a neck to the nest, as seen in those nests we con- 

 sider the most elaborate, seems to merely represent a surplusage of 



