Rare and Curious Nests. 271 



and roadside would strive in vain to excel. But the male 

 would have nothing at all to do with the matter, but re- 

 mained the same cold, indifferent being as I found him to be 

 upon my first introduction. 



Some nests are curious on account of shape. The birds 

 often, it would seem, try their very best to see how oddly they 

 can build their homes. The little Acadian Flycatcher, so 

 common in Eastern Pennsylvania during the breeding-season, 

 sometimes appears to be controlled by cranky ideas with re- 

 gard to building. Dry blossoms of the hickory are the ma- 

 terials it ordinarily uses, and they can always be obtained 

 whenever needed, but in a nest discovered by the writer in 

 1882, not a blossom was to be found, but in place of them there 

 were long, stringy fibres of the inner bark of some species of 

 herbaceous plant, which the birds had modelled into a com- 

 pactly-built, shallow, saucer-like cavity, and from which they 

 had caused to depend a gradually tapering train of the same 

 for nearly nine inches. 



The King Bird, a distant relative of the Flycatcher, often 

 displays as much eccentricity. Once upon a time a pair of 

 King Birds took a fancy to an old apple-tree that stood within 

 a few yards of my Germantown home. It was certainly not 

 a place of quiet and retirement, for scores of noisy, dirty 

 children daily resorted to its leafy shelter for coolness and 

 pastime. But the birds were not the least disquieted. They 

 had fixed their minds upon the spot, and build they did. 

 The nest was posed between a forked branch, just out of the 

 reach of the urchins. It was a crazy affair. Black, slender 

 roots, wrinkled and knotted and tendrilled, made up the 

 body of the fabric. As it was nearing completion, the 

 opportune discovery of a bunch of carpet rags was hailed 

 with delight. They were instantly appropriated, and 

 promptly adjusted to the outside, but in such a manner that 

 long ends, some fourteen inches in length, were made to 

 project from the sides and bottom. Whether all this was 

 for ornament or protection, or for both, I could not say, but 



