I said;
"surely the bluebirds will prefer this to an artificial box." But, lo
and behold, it already had bluebirds in it! We had not heard a sound or
seen a feather till the trunk was in our hands, when, on peering into
the cavity, we discovered two young bluebirds about half grown. This was
a predicament indeed!

Well, the only thing we could do was to stand the tree-trunk up again as
well as we could, and as near as we could to where it had stood before.
This was no easy thing. But after a time we had it fairly well
replaced, one end standing in the mud of the shallow water and the other
resting against a tree. This left the hole to the nest about ten feet
below and to one side of its former position. Just then we heard the
voice of one of the parent birds, and we quickly paddled to the other
side of the stream, fifty feet away, to watch her proceedings, saying to
each other, "Too bad! too bad!" The mother bird had a large beetle in
her beak. She alighted upon a limb a few feet above the former site of
her nest, looked down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then dropped
down confidently to the point in the vacant air where the entrance to
her nest had been but a few moments before. Here she hovered on the wing
a second or two, looking for something that was not there, and then
returned to the perch she had just left, apparently not a little
disturbed. She hammered the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb a few
times, as if it were in some way at fault, then dropped down to try for
her nest again. Only vacant air there! She hovers and hovers, her blue
wings flickering in the checkered light; surely that precious hole
_must_ be there; but no, again she is baffled, and again she returns to
her perch, and mauls the poor beetle till it must be reduced to a pulp.
Then she makes a third attempt, then a fourth, and a fifth, and a
sixth, till she becomes very much excited. "What could have happened? am
I dreaming? has that beetle hoodooed me?" she seems to say, and in her
dismay she lets the bug drop, and looks bewilderedly about her. Then she
flies away through the woods, calling. "Going for her mate," I said to
Ted. "She is in deep trouble, and she wants sympathy and help."

In a few minutes we heard her mate answer, and presently the two birds
came hurrying to the spot, both with loaded beaks. They perched upon the
familiar limb above the site of the nest, and the mate seemed to say,
"My dear, what has happened to you?