pen shutter, in the vines against the side of the house, on top of an
old robin's nest in the tree, in the bird boxes which have been put up
for more desirable creatures; anywhere and everywhere this industrious
little mother is liable to build her nest. Her husband will help her
more or less in the task, often bringing material and helping to place
it in the negligent pile of which their nest is composed. But he does
a good deal more fussing and cheering up than he does actual work, and
she seems to depend much upon his cheerful presence for her happiness.
It is hard to discourage Madam Sparrow when once she has set her mind
on home-making. A bird-lover, some time since, reported how a pair of
sparrows had started to build a nest upon his lawn. He, wishing to
interfere with the process, took a small rifle and shot the male bird.
Within twenty minutes the female, who had scouted round the
neighborhood, returned with another mate and resumed her nest-building
process. Again he interjected the tragic note into her life by
shooting her second husband, only to find her start out in pursuit of
a third, with whom she returned in the course of an hour. He felt that
by this time he had interfered with her domestic happiness as much as
he had any right to do, and suffered her to continue her housekeeping
with her third husband without further molestation. I imagine it would
have puzzled both birds to tell who was the father of the nestlings
who appeared two weeks later.

Not only do sparrows nest early, they nest often. I suggested to one
of my students that she locate as early in the season as she could the
nest of a pair of English sparrows, which was sufficiently accessible,
and that she keep it under observation at intervals of a few days
throughout the summer. In the fall she came to me with glowing eyes
and gave me her report. "It is simply great," she said. "I never went
to that nest a single time this summer to find it empty. When I first
got there I found four eggs; after a while these hatched out, and the
young were on the nest until they were old enough to fly; but before
they had left she had slipped a fresh egg among them, ready to start a
new batch. Whenever I saw the nest throughout the entire summer, I
found in it either eggs, or young, or both." Such reproductive energy
as this is hard to beat; compared with this rate of increase, the
ordinary bird is the exponent of race suicide. How can a robin hope to
compete