und-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.

Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
the whole performance.

A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.

When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
placed in view of such a continge