The Summer Yellow-Bird arrives in New England with great uniformity from the first to the middle of May. Its coming is usually the harbinger of the opening summer and expanding leaves. Unlike most of its family, it is confiding and familiar, easily encouraged, by attention to its wants, to cultivate the society of man. It confidingly builds its nest in gardens, often in close vicinity to dwellings, and in the midst of large villages and cities, among the shrubbery of frequented parks. This Warbler, soon after its arrival, begins the construction of its nest. It is usually placed in low bushes, three or four feet from the ground. Occasionally very different positions are chosen. Hedges of buckthorn and hawthorn, barberry-bushes, and other low shrubs, are their favorite places of resort. On one occasion the nest was placed some forty feet from the ground, in the top of a horse-chestnut tree overhanging the main street of a village. Such high positions are, however, not very common. The nest is invariably fastened to several twigs with great firmness, and with a remarkable neatness and skill. A great variety of materials is employed in the construction of their nests, though not often in the same nest, which is usually quite homogeneous. The more common materials are the hempen fibres of plants, fibrous strips of bark, slender stems of plants and leaves, and down of asclepias. Interwoven with these, forming the inner materials, are the down from willow catkins, the woolly furze from fern-stalks and the _Eriophorum virginicum_, and similar substances. These are lined with soft, fine grasses, hair, feathers, and other warm materials. Cotton, where procurable, is a favorite material; as also is wool, where abundant. I have known instances where nests were built almost exclusively of one or the other material. A pair of these birds, in 1836, built their nest under a parlor window in Roxbury, where all their operations could be closely watched. When discovered, only the framework, the fastening to the supporting twigs, had been erected. The work of completion was simple and rapid. The female was the chief builder, taking her position in the centre of the nest and arranging the materials in their places as her mate brought them to her. Occasionally, with outstretched wings and expanded tail, she would whirl herself round, giving to the soft and yielding materials their hemispherical form. At intervals she arrested her revolutions to stop and regulate with her bill some unyielding portion. When her mate was dilatory, she made brief excursions and collected material for herself, and when the materials brought her were deemed unsuitable, they were rejected in a most summary and amusing manner. The important part of the tail-feathers in shaping the nest and placing the materials in position was a striking feature in this interesting performance. The greater portion of the nest was thus constructed in a single day.