204 
ICTERUS PECORIS. 
larger flocks, generally accompanied by numbers of 
the redwings ; between whom and the present species 
there is a considerable similarity of manners, dialect, 
and personal resemblance. In these aerial voyages,' 
like other experienced navigators, they take advantage 
of the direction of the wind ; and always set out with 
a favourable gale. My venerable and observing friend, 
Mr Bartram, writes me, on the 13th of October, as 
follows:-— “ The day before yesterday, at the height 
of the northeast storm, prodigious numbers of the 
cow-pen birds came by us, in several flights of some 
thousands in a flock ; many of them settled on trees in 
the garden to rest themselves ; and then resumed their 
voyage southward. There were a few of their cousins , 
the redwings, with them. We shot three, a male and 
two females.” 
From the early period at which these birds pass in 
the spring, it is highly probable that their migrations 
extend very far north. Those which pass in the months 
of March and April can have no opportunity of deposi- 
ting their eggs here, there being not more than one or 
two of our small birds which build so early. Those 
that pass in May and June are frequently observed 
loitering singly about solitary thickets, reconnoitring, 
no doubt, for proper nurses, to whose care they may 
commit the hatching of their eggs, and the rearing of 
their helpless orphans. Among the birds selected for 
this duty are the following, all of which are described 
in this work : — the bluebird, which builds in a hollow 
tree ; the chipping sparrow, in a cedar bush ; the 
golden-crowned thrush, on the ground, in the shape of 
an oven ; the red-eyed flycatcher, a neat pensile nest, 
hung by the two upper edges on a small sapling, or 
drooping branch; the yellow-bird, in the fork of an 
alder ; the Maryland yellow-throat, on the ground, at 
the roots of brier bushes ; the white-eyed flycatcher, a 
pensile nest on the bending of a smilax vine ; and the 
small blue-gray flycatcher, also a pensile nest, fastened 
to the slender twigs of a tree, sometimes at the height 
■of fifty or sixty feet from the ground. There are, no 
