unconcern.

These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo is
occasionally found in the nest of other birds, raise the inquiry whether
our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European species,
which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether on the other
hand it be not mending its manners in this respect. It has but little to
unlearn or forget in the one case, but great progress to make in the
other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere platform of coarse twigs
and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep, compact, finely woven and finely
modeled nest of the goldfinch or kingbird, and what a gulf between its
indifference toward its young and their solicitude! Its irregular manner
of laying also seems better suited to a parasite like our cow-bird, or
the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder.

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which
is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow, he thinks, fly against
the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat
of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter
escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early
spring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling and screaming high in
air, approach each other, extend a claw, and grasping them together,
fall toward the earth flapping and struggling as if they were tied
together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again.
He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the
hawks were toying fondly with each other.

* * * * *

When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects
about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how they
attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a
mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were
very hungry and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his
machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood
of hungry chickens. He says there was a continual rush of purple wings
over the "cutter-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to
tremble and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would have gone
hungry yet another day.

Of the hen-hawk he has observed that both the male and female take part
in incubation. "I was rather