mice, dogs or ponies you can observe and watch
their habits and learn to understand them well;
but generally for Guides it is more easy to watch
birds, because you see them both in town and
country; and especially when you go into camp or
on walking tours you can observe and watch their
habits, especially in the springtime.

Then it is that you see the old birds making their
nests, hatching out their eggs and bringing up
their young; and that is of course the most
interesting time for watching them. A good
observant guide will get to know the different
kinds of birds by their cry, by their appearance,
and by their way of flying. She will also get to
know where their nests are to be found, what sort
of nests they are, what are the colors of the eggs
and so on. And also how the young appear. Some of
them come out fluffy, others covered with
feathers, others with very little on at all. The
young pigeon, for instance, has no feathers at
all, whereas a young moorhen can swim about as
soon as it comes out of the egg; while chickens
run about and hunt flies within a few minutes; and
yet a sparrow is quite useless for some days and
is blind, and has to be fed and coddled by his
parents.

Then it is an interesting sight to see the old
birds training their young ones to fly, by getting
up above them and flapping their wings a few times
until all the young ones imitate them. Then they
hop from one twig to another, still flapping their
wings, and the young ones follow suit and begin to
find that their wings help them to balance; and
finally they jump from one branch to another for
some distance so that the wings support them in
their effort. The young ones very soon find that
they are able to use their wings for flying, but
it is all done by degrees and by careful
instruction.

Then a large number of our birds do not live all
the year round in England, but they go off to
Southern climes such as Africa when the winter
comes on; but they generally turn up here at the
end of March and make their nes