Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers | Page 8

probably taken refuge in the chimney
during some cold spring storm, and had come down the pipe to the
stove, from whence they were unable to ascend. A peculiarly touching
little incident of bird life occurred to a caged female canary. Though
unmated, it laid some eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away by
her feelings that she would offer food to the eggs, and chatter and
twitter, trying, as it seemed, to encourage them to eat! The incident is
hardly tragic, neither is it comic.
Certain birds nest in the vicinity of our houses and outbuildings, or
even in and upon them, for protection from their enemies, but they
often thus expose themselves to a plague of the most deadly character.
I refer to the vermin with which their nests often swarm, and which kill
the young before they are fledged. In a state of nature this probably
never happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it happening to
nests placed in trees or under rocks. It is the curse of civilization falling
upon the birds which come too near man. The vermin, or the germ of
the vermin, is probably conveyed to the nest in hen's feathers, or in
straws and hairs picked up about the barn or hen-house. A robin's nest
upon your porch or in your summer-house will occasionally become an
intolerable nuisance from the swarms upon swarms of minute vermin
with which it is filled. The parent birds stem the tide as long as they can,
but are often compelled to leave the young to their terrible fate.
One season a phoebe-bird built on a projecting stone under the eaves of
the house, and all appeared to go well till the young were nearly
fledged, when the nest suddenly became a bit of purgatory. The birds
kept their places in their burning bed till they could hold no longer,
when they leaped forth and fell dead upon the ground.

After a delay of a week or more, during which I imagine the parent
birds purified themselves by every means known to them, the couple
built another nest a few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a
second brood; but the new nest developed into the same bed of torment
that the first did, and the three young birds, nearly ready to fly, perished
as they sat within it. The parent birds then left the place as if it had
been accursed.
I imagine the smaller birds have an enemy in our native white-footed
mouse, though I have not proof enough to convict him. But one season
the nest of a chickadee which I was observing was broken up in a
position where nothing but a mouse could have reached it. The bird had
chosen a cavity in the limb of an apple-tree which stood but a few yards
from the house. The cavity was deep, and the entrance to it, which was
ten feet from the ground, was small. Barely light enough was admitted,
when the sun was in the most favorable position, to enable one to make
out the number of eggs, which was six, at the bottom of the dim interior.
While one was peering in and trying to get his head out of his own light,
the bird would startle him by a queer kind of puffing sound. She would
not leave her nest like most birds, but really tried to blow or scare the
intruder away; and after repeated experiments I could hardly refrain
from jerking my head back when that little explosion of sound came up
from the dark interior. One night, when incubation was about half
finished, the nest was harried. A slight trace of hair or fur at the
entrance led me to infer that some small animal was the robber. A
weasel might have done it, as they sometimes climb trees, but I doubt if
either a squirrel or a rat could have passed the entrance.
Probably few persons have ever suspected the cat-bird of being an
egg-sucker; I do not know that she has ever been accused of such a
thing, but there is something uncanny and disagreeable about her,
which I at once understood, when I one day caught her in the very act
of going through a nest of eggs.
A pair of the least fly-catchers, the bird which says chebec, chebec, and
is a small edition of the pewee, one season built their nest where I had
them for many hours each day under my observation. The nest was a
very snug and compact structure placed in the forks of a small maple
about twelve feet from the ground. The season before, a red squirrel
had harried the nest of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and