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from an unreasonable idea — the Chimney-Swift sticks her hits of twigs together, and 

 glues the frail cup to the wall with viscid saliva ; and some of the Old World Swifts 

 build nests of gummy spittle, which cakes on drying, not unlike gelatine. Undoubtedly 

 some saliva is mingled with the natural moisture of the mud ; but the readiness with 

 which these Swallows' nests crumble on drying shows that saliva enters slightly into 

 their composition, practically not at all, and that this fluid possesses no special viscosity. 

 Much more probably, the moisture of the birds' months helps to soften and temper the 

 pellets, rather than to agglutinate the dried edifice itself. 



" In various parts of the West, especially along the Missouri and the Colorado, 

 where I have never failed to find clustering nests of the Cliff-Swallow, I have occa- 

 sionally witnessed some curious associates of these birds. In some of the navigable 

 canons of the Colorado I have seen the bulky nests of the Great Blue Heron on flat 

 ledges of rock, the faces of which were stuccoed with Swallow-nests. How these 

 frolicsome creatures must have swarmed around the sedate and imperturbable Herodias, 

 when she folded up her legs and closed her eyes, and went off into the dreamland of 

 incubation, undisturbed in a very Babel ! Again, I have found a colony of Swallows in 

 what would seem to be a very dangerous neighbourhood, all about the nest of a Falcon, 

 no other than the valiant and merciless Falco polya'grus, on the very minarets and 

 buttresses of whose awe-inspiring castle, on the scowling face of a precipice, a colony of 

 Swallows was established in apparent security. The big birds seemed to be very com- 

 fortable ogres, with whom the multitude of hop-o'-my-thumbs had evidently some sort 

 of understanding, perhaps like that which the Purple Crackles may be sivpposed to have 

 with the Pish Hawks when they set up housekeeping in the cellar of King Pandion's 

 palace. If it had only been a Pish Hawk in this case instead of Falco polyagrus, we 

 could understand such amicable relations better, for Cliff- Swallows are cousins of Purple 

 Martins, and, if half we hear be true, Progne was Pandion's daughter." 



The following account of the habits of the species appeared in the ' Field ' for 1889, 

 from the pen of Mr. Ernest Iugersoll : — 



" In its primitive method of nesting we now see it only in the far west, where, 

 throughout all the mountain-ranges, and elsewhere in suitable localities, hundreds of 

 colonies are found associated in a happy and j>rosperous home-life. I have seen their 

 compact villages clinging to the steep faces of rock by which the mountains are walled 

 in, from one end to the other of Colorado and AVyoming ; have been within reach of 

 their nests among the crumbling earth-bluffs along the eastern base of the Snowy P^ange, 

 and in the interior parks ; have enjoyed their chatter and graceful entanglement of 

 flight as they were roused from their extensive colonies among the towering headlands 

 of the Upper Missouri — the scene and the birds simulating in miniature the beetling 

 crao's and hosts of seafowl that front the coast of Labrador or the Hebrides. No altitude 

 below timber-line seems too great for them — no region too bleak or desolate. Here, a 

 mere little ledge of tough gravel, where a bit of a brook has made a cut-bank, will 

 be the home of a dozen pairs ; there some lofty vertical wall becomes completely covered 



