d barely missed them
in my search, but by how much they had escaped my eye I could not tell.
Probably not by distance at all, but simply by unrecognition. They were
virtually invisible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry grass and
stubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly copied in the color of the
half-fledged young. More than that, they hugged the nest so closely and
formed such a compact mass, that though there were five of them, they
preserved the unit of expression,--no single head or form was defined;
they were one, and that one was without shape or color, and
not separable, except by closest scrutiny, from the one of the
meadow-bottom. That nest prospered, as bobolinks' nests doubtless
generally do; for, notwithstanding the enormous slaughter of the birds
during their fall migrations by Southern sportsmen, the bobolink
appears to hold its own, and its music does not diminish in our Northern
meadows.

Birds with whom the struggle for life is the sharpest seem to be more
prolific than those whose nest and young are exposed to fewer dangers.
The robin, the sparrow, the pewee, etc., will rear, or make the attempt
to rear, two and sometimes three broods in a season; but the bobolink,
the oriole, the kingbird, the goldfinch, the cedar-bird, the birds of
prey, and the woodpeckers, that build in safe retreats, in the trunks
of trees, have usually but a single brood. If the boblink reared two
broods, our meadows would swarm with them.

I noted three nests of the cedar-bird in August in a single orchard,
all productive, but all with one or more unfruitful eggs in them. The
cedar-bird is the most silent of our birds having but a single fine
note, so far as I have observed, but its manners are very expressive at
times. No bird known to me is capable of expressing so much silent alarm
while on the nest as this bird. As you ascend the tree and draw near it,
it depresses its plumage and crest, stretches up its neck, and becomes
the very picture of fear. Other birds, under like circumstances, hardly
change their expression at all till they launch into the air, when by
their voice they express anger rather than alarm.

I have referred to the red squirrel as a destroyer of the eggs and young
of birds. I think the mischief it does in this respect can hardly be
over estimated. Nearly all birds look upon it as their enemy, and attack
and annoy it when it appears near their breeding haunts. Thus, I have
seen the pewee, the cucko