These birds are extremely gregarious, and have been seen at sunset to cluster upon the trunk of a gigantic cypress like a swarm of bees. One after another slowly crawls through a hole into the cavity until it is filled up, while those who are not so fortunate as to obtain entrance, or reserved seats, cling to the outside of the trunk with their claws, and keep their position through the night chiefly by hooking the tip of the upper mandible of the beak into the bark of the tree. The backwoodsmen confidently assert that they have found as many as twenty eggs of a greenish white in a single hollow of a cypress-tree; and as it is generally supposed, judging from the known habits of other species of this genus, that the Carolina Parrot lays only two eggs, but few naturalists doubt that these birds nest in companies. It is a very difficult task to find the nests of parrots in the West Indies, some of them building in the hollowed top of the dead trunk of a royal palm which has been denuded of its branches; and there, upon the unprotected summit of a single column eighty feet in height, without any shelter from tropical storms, the Cuban Parrot rears its young. The Carolina Parrot is the only one of this species which may truly be said to be a permanent resident of our country. The Mexican species are sometimes met with along the southwestern boundaries of the United States, but they emigrate only a few miles northward of their own regions. The salt-licks in the great button-wood bottoms along the Mississippi were once the favorite resorts of these birds, and they delighted to drink the saline water. It is to be regretted that so interesting a bird should have been so ruthlessly slaughtered where they were once so numerous. Only the young birds are fit to eat, but we read in the accounts of our pioneer naturalists that from eight to twenty birds were often killed by the single discharge of a gun, and that as the survivors would again and again return to the lurking- place of their destroyer, attracted by the distressing cries of their wounded comrades, the unfeeling sportsman would continue his work of destruction until more than half of a large flock would be exterminated. This interesting parakeet may, during the next century, pass out of existence, and be known to our descendants as the Great Auk (Alca impennis) is now known to us, as a very rare specimen in the museums of natural history.