Order COCCYGES. 
Family CUCULID 2. 
COCCYZUS AMERICANUS (L.). (387.) 
YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO. 
This widely distributed species had escaped my observation 
long after the Black-billed Cuckoo had become exceedingly 
familiar to me here, but in the spring of 1867 I met with a 
pair on the 30th of April, in some brushland bordering the 
heavy timber within a mile of the Mississippi river at Min- 
neapolis. Having secured them both, I made exceptional 
efforts to find others, which however proved unavailing, and I 
was thus left to the presumption that they were probably 
stragglers until the next year, when tomy great joy, I found 
them again on the 14th of May, in the timber but a short dis- 
tance from one of our small, beautiful lakes, not two miles 
from where I first saw the others a year earlier. This time 
they were breeding. The nest, constructed of dry sticks, 
loosely interwoven and covered with some moss and catkins 
from the blossoming trees, was placed on a horizontal limb of 
an oak about seven feet from the ground. It contained four 
greenish-blue eggs. 
From that time until the present, I have see them at irregu- 
lar intervals, but itis not a common species in any section I 
have personally explored. 
A friend of mine, much interested in the habits of familiar 
species, had the fortune to secure a nest at Lake Minnetonka, 
under very simular circumstances, a year later. Mr. Lewis 
says of this species, ‘‘Common at Pelican lake, Becker 
county.” He was familiar with the Black-billed Cuckoo, and 
could scarcely have been mistaken between the two birds. Mr. 
Howling as well as several others of our taxidermists have had 
specimens in their collections from time to time. They are 
