112 CAROLINA PARROT. 
incubation or manner of building among these birds. All agreed that 
they breed in hollow trees ; and several affirmed to me that they had 
seen their nests. Some said they carried in no materials ; others that 
they did. Some made the eggs Avhite ; others speckled. One man 
assured me that he had cut down a large beech-tree, which was hollow, 
and in which he found the broken fragments of upwards of twenty 
Paroquets' eggs, which were of a greenish yellow color. The nests, 
though destroj^ed in their texture by the falling of the tree, appeared, 
he said, to be formed of small twigs glued to each other, and to the side 
of the tree, in the manner of the Chimney Swallow. He added, that 
if it were the proper season, he could point out .to me the weed from 
which they procured the gluey matter. From all these contradictory 
accounts, nothing certain can be deduced, except that they build in 
companies, in hollow trees. That they commence incubation late in 
summer, or very early in the spring, I think highly probable, from the 
numerous dissections I made in the months of March, April, jMay and 
June ; and the great variety which I found in the color of the plumage 
of the head and neck, of both sexes, during the two former of these 
months, convinces me, that the young birds do not receive their full 
toloi's until the early part of the succeeding summer. 
While Parrots and Paroquets, from foreign countries, abound in 
almost every street of our large cities, and become such great favorites, 
no attention seems to have been paid to our own, which in elegance of 
figure, and beauty of plumage, is certainly superior to many of them. 
It wants, indeed, that disposition for perpetual screaming and chatter- 
ing, that renders some of the former, pests, not only to their keepers, 
but to the whole neighborhood in which they reside. It is alike docile 
and sociable ; soon becomes perfectly familiar ; and until equal pains 
be taken in its instruction, it is unfair to conclude it incapable of equal 
improvement in the language of man. 
As so little has hitherto been known of the disposition and manners 
of this species, the reader Avill not, I hope, be displeased at my detail- 
ing some of these, in the history of a particular favorite, my sole com- 
panion in many a lonesome day's march, and of which the figure in the 
plate is a faithful resemblance. 
Anxious to try the effects of education on one of those which I pro- 
cured at Big-Bone Lick, and Avhich was but slightly wounded in the 
wing, I fixed up a place for it in the stern of my boat, and presented it 
with some cockle-burrs, which it freely fed on in less than an hour after 
being on board. The intermediate time, between eating aiad sleeping, 
was occupied in gnawing the sticks that formed its place of confinement, 
in order to make a practicable breach, which it repeatedly effected. 
When I abandoned the river, and travelled by land, I wrapped it up 
closely in a silk handkerchief, tying it tightly around, and carried it in 
