112 CAROLINA PARROT. 



incubation or manner of building among these birds. All agreed that 

 they breed in hollow trees ; and several aflBrmed to me that they had 

 seen their nests. Some said they carried in no materials ; others that 

 they did. Some made the eggs white ; others speckled. One man 

 assured me that he had cut down a large beech-tree, which was hollow, 

 and in which he found the broken fragments of upwards of twenty 

 Paroquets' eggs, which were of a greenish yellow color. 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. He added, that 

 if it were the proper season, he could point out to me the weed from 

 which they procured the gluey matter. From all these contradictory 

 accounts, nothing certain can be deduced, except that they build in 

 companies, in hollow trees. That they commence incubation late in 

 summer, or very early in the spring, I think highly probable, from the 

 numerous dissections I made in the months of March, April, May and 

 June ; and the great variety which I found in the color of the plumage 

 of the head and neck, of both sexes, during the two former of these 

 laonths, convinces me, that the young birds do not receive their full 

 colors until the early part of the succeeding summer. 



While Parrots and Paroquets, from foreign countries, abound in 

 almost every street of our large cities, and become such great favorites, 

 no attention seems to have been paid to our own, which in elegance of 

 figure, and beauty of plumage, is certainly superior to many of them. 

 It Tvants, indeed, that disposition for perpetual screaming and chatter- 

 ing, that renders some of the former, pests, not only to their keepers, 

 but to the whole neighborhood in which they reside. It is alike docile 

 and sociable ; soon becomes perfectly familiar ; and until equal pains 

 be taken in its instruction, it is unfair to conclude it incapable of equal 

 improvement in the language of man. 



As so little has hitherto been known of the disposition and manners 

 of this species, the reader will not, I hope, be displeased at my detail- 

 ing some of these, in the history of a particular favorite, my sole com- 

 panion in many a lonesome day's march, and of which the figure in the 

 plate is a faithful resemblance. 



Anxious to try the eflfects of education on one of those which I pro- 

 cured at Big-Bone Lick, and which was but slightly wounded in the 

 wing, I fixed up a place for it in the stern of my boat, and presented it 

 with some cockle-burrs, which it freely fed on in less than an hour after 

 being on board. The intermediate time, between eating and sleeping, 

 was occupied in gnawing the sticks that formed its place of confinement, 

 in order to make a practicable breach, which it repeatedly effected. 

 'When I abandoned the river, and travelled by land, I wrapped it up 

 closely in a silk handkerchief, tying it tightly around, and carried it in 



