their
broad, sable wings, flew a few rods, and alighted on another horizontal
bar. There they sat as long as I could see them in the thickening
darkness, turning their heads now and then to see whether their
ill-bred visitor was still spying upon them. They made no efforts to
conceal themselves, as the small birds do in roosting, for they knew,
no doubt, that nothing would carry off fowls of their size.

A little later on the same evening a whip-poor-will darted up from the
roadside and flew into the woods a short distance, alighting on a white
flag of good size, so that I could plainly see his dark form in the
moonlight. Then I was witness of this uncanny bird's table manners,
which were entirely unknown to me and may be to others. At irregular
intervals he leaped into the air, now in one direction, now in another,
captured an insect, and flew back to the top of the flag. Some of his
evolutions were quite wonderful, and all of them were the perfection of
grace. He described all kinds of curves and loops. On alighting he
uttered a low, hollow chuck suggestive of the sepulchral. Another
notch had to be cut in the tally-stick of my ornithological journey--I
had learned how the whip-poor-will takes his nocturnal dinner of moths
and beetles, and I felt that there was still such a thing as news to be
gathered in birdland.

Most birds, however, do not take their dinner at night, and therefore
it is easier to watch them at their _table d'hote_. One day a
red-headed woodpecker was giving a strapping youngster as large as
herself his noonday meal. She came close to him with a morsel in her
long bill, and, after pounding it awhile against a limb, she thrust it
into the screaming youngling's mouth. But she had failed to reduce it
to a swallowable size; it stuck in his throat, and, do what he would,
he could not bolt it. It was so large that he was choking; what should
be done? The simplest thing you can conceive. The mother bird reached
over and impatiently jerked the refractory morsel out of her baby's
throat, thumped it vigorously several times against the branch, then
gave it to him again, as much as to say, "Now try it! I guess you can
manage it this time." And he did, for down his gullet it went with
very little effort. Then she went after more provender for his
spacious craw. Whenever she came with a tidbit, she would first drop
it into a kind of pocket in the bark, and pound it a while to reduce it
to a