The plainer and grayer markings of the female and immature birds may differ very considerably from the more pronounced black and white, orange-red and salmon-colored blotches of the adult male, but never so strikingly manifesting themselves in the markings of the tail which in either case may appear to the casual observer as quite similar. Yet if we examine them more critically we will discover that they are distinctly different, the salmon-red and black-tipped feathers of the male bird being replaced by a paler reddish-yellow and grayer-tipped arrangement in the case of the female. Young males have the darker markings of the tail feathers very similar to those of the adult birds, which we are told do not take on the complete dress until the third year. But the habit of constantly flitting the tail in fan-like motions is peculiar alike to all phases of this bird's plumage and above all other characters serves as the greatest aid in naming it. The very young, or nestling dress, of which little or nothing seems to have been written, bears a partial resemblance to that of the female bird, excepting that the wings are crossed by two yellowish bands, caused by the lighter tippings of the outer coverts. The yellow breast spots of the female are also wanting in this dress. For further particulars the reader is kindly referred to the colored plate accompanying this article. Like the robin red-breasts, the name of the Redstart seems to have been brought to America by the earlier settlers who were ever on the watch for familiar objects to remind them of former days, and, as in the case of the example just cited, wrongfully ascribed by them to a far different bird. An analogy, however, exists in the coloration of the European and American birds justifying in a measure the reason for so naming it. We are told, in Newton's Dictionary of Birds, that the Redstart, the Ruticilla phoenicurus of most ornithologists, is well known in Great Britain, where it is also called the Fire-tail, from the word "start" which in the original Anglo-Saxon "steort," means tail. But the English bird is very different from ours throughout, a marked distinction being its peculiarity of habit in seeking out for a nesting site a hole in a tree or ruined building. Our bird, contrary to all this, more correctly builds its nest out of doors, usually selecting the upright forks of some tall shrub or small tree and placing therein a neat, compact structure, in which four or five light-colored eggs are deposited that in their spotted appearance and blotching of various shades of brown resemble very closely the eggs of the common yellow warbler (Dendroica aestiva). But for all this, however, it repairs to the shadier depths of the woods while the yellow warbler on the other hand seeks out the more tangled thickets and willow copses.