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General Notes. 1 1 7 
New Mexico, during fall and winter. I met with them in small flocks 
on the hill-sides bordering the barren plains, where a few stunted bunches 
of grass, scattered weeds, the tree cactus, and thorny bushes occasionally 
dotted the ground. The birds were very active, running about with tail 
steadily erected at an angle of 45 0 , in an odd, easy, graceful manner 
which readily attracted attention. When startled they flew to the top of a 
bush, but quickly dropped again to the ground. I thought, as I saw them 
running so swiftly, stopping now and then to pick up food or occasionally 
to scratch the ground, that they were busily engaged in catching a small 
kind of beetle I had noticed, but in dissecting four that I shot December 
2 and 3, 1880, I found in their stomachs only small seeds and coarse 
gravel. The measurements of the birds shot are as follows : — 
$ Length, 6.20; extent, 9.50; wing, 3.00; tail, 2.60; tarsus, .80: bill, .40. 
$ Length, 6.50; extent, 9.50; wing, 3.00; tail, 3.00; tarsus, .80; bill, .40. 
$ Length, 6.50; extent, 9.75 ; wing, 3.10; tail, 3.00; tarsus, .80; bill, .40. 
$ Length, 6.00; extent, 9.00; wing, 2.75 ; tail, 2.65; tarsus, .80: bill, .40. 
Iris, dark brown; bill, dusky, the base of the lower mandible pale blue. 
Legs, dark-reddish brown ; feet and claws black. — N. S. Goss, Neosho 
Falls , Kansas. 
Peculiar Nidification of the Bobolink. — During the haying 
season of 1854, I found in a meadow where I was at work a nest of the 
Bobolink ( Dolichonyx oryzivorus') occupying the space between four stalks 
of a growing narrow dock ( Rumex crtspus). This nest was suspended 
from four points of its circumference, 90° apart, to the four stalks of the 
plant which grew from the same root. The bottom of the nest was about 
six inches above the ground. It was constructed entirely of vegetable 
material and consisted of two distinctly separate parts. A hemispherical 
cup, in one piece of coarse but neatly woven cloth, very strong and 
very light, was fastened to the living, growing supports by strong 
fibres passing around each stalk above and below a joint and firmly woven 
into the rim of the cup with some of the longer strings interlacing the 
sides. Loups passed through the bottom of the cup were attached to 
diagonal supports. The edge or rim of this cup was about half an inch 
thick at the points of bearing and about one-fourth of an inch in the 
quadrants. The texture just below the rim was closely woven and strongly 
wrought, varying from one-eighth to one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness, 
growing thinner gradually from the edge, and a small space in the lowest 
part was of open work evidently designed to secure good and certain 
drainage. 
In this hanging basket was an elaborate lining of very soft blades of 
grass between which and the cup was an elastic padding. The woven cup 
was about five inches in diameter and five inches deep, the padding about 
half an inch thick, and the lining about the same thickness. The whole 
structure, dock and nest, swayed in every passing breeze but the nest was 
so strongly fastened to the stalks and the plant so securely held by the 
nest that it would have required a hurricane or tornado to have blown it 
away. 
