SUMMER YELLOW-BIRD OR WARBLER. 367 
eating her nest. Although their song may be heard, 
less vigorously, to the month of August, yet they do not 
here appear to raise more than a single brood. 
The nest, in Massachusetts, is commonly fixed in the 
forks of a barberry bush, close shrub, or sapling, a few 
feet from the ground ; at other times, I have known the 
nest placed upon the horizontal branch of a horn-beam, 
more than 15 feet from the ground, or even 50 feet high 
in the forks of a thick sugar-maple or orchard tree. 
These lofty situations are, however, extraordinary ; and 
the little architects, in instances of this kind, sometimes 
fail of giving the usual security to their habitation. The 
nest is extremely neat and durable ; the exterior is form- 
ed of layers of Asclepias or silk-weed lint, glutinously 
though slightly attached to the supporting twigs, mix- 
ed with some slender strips of fine bark and pine leaves, 
and thickly bedded with the down of willows, the nan- 
keen-wool of the Virginian cotton-grass, # the down of 
fern stalks, the hair from the downy seeds of the button- 
wood [Plat anus ) , or the pappus of compound flowers ; and 
then lined either with fine-bent grass (Agrostis), or down, 
and horse-hair, and rarely with a few accidental feath- 
ers. Circumstances sometimes require a variation from 
the usual habits of the species. In a garden in Roxbury, 
in the vicinity of Boston, I saw a nest built in a currant- 
bush, in a small garden very near to the house ; and, as 
the branch did not present the proper site of security, a 
large floor of dry grass and weeds was first made betwixt 
it and a contiguous board fence ; in the midst of this 
mass of extraneous materials, the small nest was excava- 
ted, then lined with a considerable quantity of white horse- 
hair, and finished with an interior bed of soft cow-hair. 
The season proving wet and stormy, the nest in this 
*Eriophorum virginicum. 
