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 s2em, 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 upona 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 acrazy 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 
