Some things cause a great to-do in the jay world. One day, while I was living in Kansas, the skeleton of a jay, with the feathers still attached, was found in the rubbish of an ash-pile in my rear yard, and exposed to view. An hour later a half dozen or more jays were flinging about in the peach tree above the feathers of their dead comrade, screaming at the top of their voices, "juking" their bodies, as is their wont when excited, and glaring at the disheveled plumes on the ground. If it was a funeral service, it certainly was a demonstrative one, and I do not believe that their grief and terror were affected. A HANDSOME SCISSORSTAIL* *Reprinted by permission from "American Ornithology," with important additions. In order to study the scissorstailed flycatcher (_Milvulus forficatus_), of which some friends had told me again and again in a glow of enthusiasm, I made a trip to southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. Several days passed before an individual of this species put in appearance, as the scissorstails, which are migrants, had not yet returned from their winter quarters in a more southern clime, and so I had to wait for their arrival. One day a friend and I were driving along a country road over the prairie, when a quaint bird form went swinging from the wire fence by the roadside toward a clump of willows in a shallow dip of the prairie. Dashing after him, I heard a clear, musical call that proclaimed a bird with which I had not yet become acquainted. In a few moments he flew from the tree. My binocular was fixed upon him as he went flitting across the field and presently alighted on the ground. My surmise was correct; it was the scissorstail flycatcher, one of the most unique and handsome birds belonging to our American avifauna, one that merits more than a passing notice. To see him perched on a fence, or swinging gracefully through the air, and hear his bell-like calls and whistles makes you feel as if you were suddenly transported to a foreign land, like Australia or Borneo, where so many feathered curios are to be found.