158 CAROLINA PARROT. 



agent, to administer it by the first opportunity, and write me 

 the result; but I have never yet heard from him. A respectable 

 lady near the town of Natchez, and on whose word I can rely, 

 assured me, that she herself had made the experiment, and that, 

 whatever might be the cause, the cat had actually died either 

 on that or the succeeding day. A French planter near Bayo 

 Fourche pretended to account to me for this effect, by positively 

 asserting, that the seeds of the cockle-burrs, on which the Pa- 

 roquets so eagerly feed, were deleterious to cats; and thus their 

 death was produced by eating the intestines of the bird. These 

 matters might easily have been ascertained on the spot, which, 

 however, a combination of trifling circumstances prevented me 

 from doing. I several times carried a dose of the first descrip- 

 tion in my pocket, till it became insufferable, without meeting 

 with a suitable patient, on whom, like other professional gen- 

 tlemen, I might conveniently make a fair experiment. 



I was equally unsuccessful in my endeavours to discover the 

 time of incubation or manner of building among these birds. All 

 agreed that they breed in hollow trees; and several affirmed 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 colour. 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 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 colour of the plumage of the head 



