46 LAND-BIRDS AND GAME-BIRDS 
life, I have thought it best not to attempt their biography in 
this volume. For an enthusiastic and splendid description, I 
refer my readers to the second volume of Wilson’s Ornithology. 
(B) caroxinensis. Cat-bird. 
(A common summer-resident.) 
(a). 83-9 inches long. Slate-colored. Crown and tail, 
black. Under tail-coverts, chestnut-red. 
(b). The nest of the Cat-bird, which in Massachusetts is 
usually finished in the last week of May, is generally placed 
in a bush, thicket, or briar, and is composed outwardly of 
sticks (and sometimes one or two rags intermixed), being 
lined with strips of bark from the grape-vine or cedar, dead 
leaves, rootlets, and other things of the same sort. The eggs 
of each set are 3-5, usually four, of a fine dark green, bluish- 
tinted, and measure about ‘95 & -70 of an inch. Two broods 
are sometimes raised in the summer. 
(c). The Cat-birds are in summer very common in the old 
‘‘Bay State,” and are familiar to many of its inhabitants, usual- 
ly appearing in their haunts here in the first week of May, 
some returning to the South in September, others waiting until 
the middle of October. Though very numerous in the culti- 
vated districts of Massachusetts, they are rather rare in the 
northern parts of New England; and yet “ they have been 
met with in Arctic countries,” as have Robins also. They for 
the most part prefer the neighborhood of man and of culti- 
vated soil, though one may often find their nests in wild spots, 
far from any house, since they roam over all the open country. 
Though never properly gregarious, individuals do the work of 
a host in destroying injurious insects; eating the caterpillars, 
which they find in orchards, shrubbery, bushes, and thickets, 
and feeding upon “ cut-worms,” which they obtain in ploughed 
lands. This fare they vary by occasionally catching winged 
insects, as they fly through the air, but more often by eating 
berries of various kinds, chiefly such as grow in swamps. 
From the nature of their usual employment, they rarely have 
occasion to perch very far above the ground, or to take other 
