About the middle of April, a pair of Blue Quits built a nest on one of the topmost branches of a high fiddle wood in the yard of Bluefields house. The tree was much infested with that parasite called Old man’s beard, large bunches of which grew on most of the limbs and boughs, so numerously as to touch each other in long successions. Two of these contiguous bunches the birds had managed to separate, either by picking away portions, or by pushing them apart, so as to open a large hollow, and in this they built a very snug domed nest. It was globular in form, about as large as an infant’s head, with an opening in one side, composed of dry grass, the dried stems of the _Tillandsia_, tendrils of passion-flower, bits of rag, profusely intermixed with cotton and the down of plants; yet these soft substances were not used to line the structure, the grass only appearing in the inside. Perhaps it was not finished, for the birds were passing in and out, and thus betrayed its existence, for so identified was it in appearance with the bunches around, that but for this ingress and egress, and the little opening, I could not have detected it. I sent up a lad to examine it, but in so doing, he partially broke the branch, causing it to hang down; and this I presume awakened suspicion, for the birds deserted it, and in a few days I had it taken down. It was empty. Mr. Hill has favoured me with the following interesting memorandum. “Feb. 5. 1838. Near the piazza of my house a cotton-bush has flung out its knots of white filaments. Hither come the birds at this season to gather materials for constructing their nests. The Blue Sparrow, a pretty little frugivorous bird that sings in our fruit trees, all the year round, its merry twittering song, has been busily engaged with his mate collecting bills-full of cotton. It did not seem to be a thing immediately settled that they should set to work and gather their materials at once. They had alighted on the tree as if they had very unexpectedly found what they were seeking. The male began to twitter a song of joy, dancing and jumping about, and the female, intermingling every now and then a chirp, frisked from stem to stem, and did very little more than survey the riches of the tree: at least she plucked now and then a bill-full of the filaments, and spreading it to flaunt to the wind tossed it away, as if she had been merely shewing that it every way answered the purpose in length and softness, and was in every respect the thing they wanted. At each of these displays of the kind and quality of the materials, the male intermingled his twittering song with a hoarse succession of notes, which were always the same, _chu, chu, chu, chu, chwit_; to which the female chirped two or three times in succession; then grasping another bill-full of cotton, tossed it away as before, and obtained from the male the same notes of attention and approval. At last they set to work in earnest, gathered a load of