COTTON-TREE SPARROW. 255 



opening being near the bottom. I have seen the 

 bird enter this monstrous structure, but have had 

 no opportunity of examining it. Dr. Robinson 

 observes that " the Black Bulfinch builds a nest as 

 big as a Blackbird's cage, and by the artful con- 

 trivance of this little volatile, the whole has the 

 simple appearance of a heap of trash, flung on some 

 bough of a tree, as it were by accident, so that 

 nobody would suppose it to be anything else." 

 And in another passage he records having found 

 the nest at Negril, on the 22nd of April, 1761, at 

 the summit of a Cabbage-palm, eighty-one feet high, 

 which he had caused to be felled: "Among the 

 spadices of this tree was fixed, how I cannot tell, 

 the nest of the Black Bulfinch, made up of various 

 matter; viz. old cane-trash fibres, silk-cotton, some 

 dry leaves, and at the bottom many tendrils of 

 climbing shrubs, and a very small species of epi- 

 dendrum, or green wyth, common in this parish. 

 In it I found one eg^^ about an inch long, in colour 

 like that of a common duck, that is, of a sullied 

 white," (MSS. i. 72.) 



Mr, Hill saw one building in a vale in Clarendon 

 in August. It had begun a domed nest of dried 

 grass, rather loosely interwoven, then about as large 

 as a child's head, but probably it would have been 

 larger. It was in a fork of an outer limb of a log- 

 wood tree at the edge of a thicket, about seven 

 feet from the ground. The bird went and came, 

 bringing materials repeatedly, while my friend was 

 watching it. 



Sam maintains that he has repeatedly seen it enter 



