In some “Notes of a Year,” published in the Companion to the Jamaica Almanack, Mr. Hill had used the term, “triangular,” in connexion with the flight of this bird. In reply to a question of mine, on the subject, he thus writes: “I send you a diagram of the flittings about of the Goatsucker. It illustrates my allusion to the triangular flight of the bird. This peculiar cutting of triangles struck my attention, when I was watching the morning flight of some three or four Goatsuckers, just at day-dawn, while I strolled through the pastures of a pen in St. Andrew’s, where I was visiting. The morning twilight had spread a clear glassy gloom over the whole cloudless expanse around and above me; and as no direct ray shone on the woods and fields, which lay silent and sombre beneath,—the flitting birds were seen distinctly, like dark moving spots against the grey sky. I was struck with the sudden shifts by triangles which they were seen to make. They never moved very far from one to another direction, but darted backward and forward over a space of some five hundred yards, preserving a pretty constant horizontal traverse, over some trees in a near pasture, whose honeyed fragrance on the morning air told that they were in blossom. Occasionally only, they rose and sank so as suddenly to change their elevation above the clumps of foliage. Yarrell observes that Goatsuckers are remarkable for beating over very circumscribed spaces; but I have not found any one who notices their cutting in and out by triangular shifts. It is not so perceptible in the obscurity of the evening, but in the perspicuousness of day-dawn it is plainly visible; and I made a note of it, and dotted in the angular appearance at the time.” In some parts of Jamaica this bird bears the appellation, most absurdly misapplied, of “Turtle-dove:” it is occasionally shot for the table, being usually fat and plump. It is a very beautiful bird. The stomach, protuberant below the _sternum_, is a large globular sac; the other viscera are small. Of one which I dissected, shot in its evening career, the stomach was stuffed with an amazing number of insects, almost (if not quite) wholly consisting of small beetles of the genus _Bostrichus_: there were probably not fewer than two hundred of these beetles, all of one species, about a quarter of an inch long. The primaries, which are long and narrow, have a peculiar downy surface, like the nap of cloth, extending down the inner vanes, and covering the outer two-thirds of their breadth; this is visible only on the upper surface. It does not exist in our Nyctibius.