PSEUDOLEISTES VIRESCENS. 103 



flock, making the air resound with their loud ringing notes. After 

 feeding, they repair to the trees, where they join their robust voices in 

 a spirited concert, without any set form of melody such as other song- 

 birds possess, but all together, flinging out their notes at random, as if 

 mad with joy. In this delightful hubbub there are some soft silvery 

 sounds. Where they are never persecuted they have little fear of man, 

 but they invariably greet his approach with a loud vigorous remon- 

 strance. 



In October the birds break up their companies to pair. Sometimes 

 they breed on the open plain in a large cardoon thistle, but a thick 

 bush OP low tree is preferred. The nest is like that of a Thrush, being 

 deep, compactly made of dry grass and slender sticks, plastered inside 

 with mud, and lined with hair or soft dry grass. It is, however, deeper 

 and more symmetrical than the Thrush's nest, and it is sometimes 

 plastered with cow-dung instead of with mud. The eggs are four, very 

 long, white, and abundantly spotted with deep red, the spots becoming 

 confluent at the large end. 



The Yellow-breast is never seen to quarrel with its fellows or with 

 other birds, and it is possibly due to its peaceful disposition that it is 

 more victimized by the parasitical Molothrus than any other bird. I 

 have frequently found their nests full of parasitical eggs, as many as 

 fourteen and in one case sixteen, eggs in one nest. In some seasons 

 all the nests I found and watched were eventually abandoned by 

 the birds on account of the number of parasitical eggs dropped in them. 

 I have also so frequently found parasitical eggs on the ground under 

 the nest that I believe the Yellow-breast throws out some of these 

 foreign eggs, and in one instance I was quite sure that this had 

 happened. The nest was in a cardoon bush, and contained five eggs 

 two of the Yellow-breast and three parasitical. These three were of 

 the variety most thickly mottled with red, and consequently closely 

 resembling the eggs of the Yellow-breast. I was surprised to find five 

 more eggs of the Cow-bird on the ground, close together, and about 

 three feet from the bush ; and these five eggs were all pure white and 

 unspotted. Naturally I asked, How came these eggs in such a posi- 

 tion ? They had not fallen from the nest, which was very deep, con- 

 tained few eggs, and was scarcely thirty inches above the ground. 

 Then they were all white, while those in the nest were mottled. That 

 the eggs had been laid in the nest I felt certain ; and the only way I 

 can account for their being in the place where I found them is that 

 the Yellow-breast itself removed them, taking them up in its bill and 

 flying with them to the ground. If I am right, we must believe that 

 this individual Yellow-breast had developed an instinct unusual in the 



