ht began to shake the branches, the consternation of both
old and young was great. The stump of a limb that held the nest was
about three inches thick, and at the bottom of the tunnel was
excavated quite to the bark. With my thumb I broke the thin wall, and
the young, which were full-fledged, looked out upon the world for the
first time. Presently one of them, with a significant chirp, as much
to say, "It is time we were out of this," began to climb up toward the
proper entrance. Placing himself in the hole, he looked around without
manifesting any surprise at the grand scene that lay spread out before
him. He was taking his bearings, and determining how far he could
trust the power of his untried wings to take him out of harm's way.
After a moment's pause, with a loud chirrup, he launched out and made
tolerable headway. The others rapidly followed. Each one, as it
started upward, from a sudden impulse, contemptuously saluted the
abandoned nest with its excrement.
Though generally regular in their habits and instincts, yet the birds
sometimes seem as whimsical and capricious as superior beings. One is
not safe, for instance, in making any absolute assertion as to their
place or mode of building. Ground-builders often get up into a bush,
and tree-builders sometimes get upon the ground or into a tussock of
grass. The song sparrow, which is a ground builder, has been known to
build in the knothole of a fence rail; and a chimney swallow once got
tired of soot and smoke, and fastened its nest on a rafter in a hay
barn. A friend tells me of a pair of barn swallow which, taking a
fanciful turn, saddled their nest in the loop of a rope that was
pendent from a peg in the peak, and liked it so well that they
repeated the experiment next year. I have know the social sparrow, or
"hairbird" to build under a shed, in a tuft of hay that hung down,
through the loose flooring, from the mow above. It usually contents
itself with half a dozen stalks of dry grass and a few long hair from
a cow's tail loosely arranged on the branch of an apple-tree. The
rough-winged swallow builds in the wall and in old stone-heaps, and I
have seen the robin build in similar localities. Others have found its
nest in old, abandoned wells. The house wren will build in anything
that has an accessible cavity, from an old boot to a bombshell. A pair
of them once persisted in building their nest in the top of a certain
pump-tree, getting in through the opening a
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