The swallows are even better masons than the robins and crows. They make their entire nests of little pills of mud, mixed with straw and their own saliva. Like the robins, too, they repair their old nests. A barn-swallow colony comes back to the old home and looks over the wind and frost battered rows of mud and straw nests under the eaves and along the rafters. They stuff up holes, and put in new linings of straw and chicken feathers. They are so trustful of their human friends that they never conceal their whereabouts, or their babies. They throw bird-egg shells, nest refuse and everything overboard, right under their nests. Most birds are very careful to carry their sweepings to a distance.
Little phoebe with her "pewit-pewee" is confiding, too, like the wrens. She builds her nest of moss and mud around dwelling houses, and under low bridge arches. The cedar-bird likes a cherry or a cedar tree. She makes a large nest as neat as her little quaker self, of clover stems, pine needles, grass and shredded bark. She is a late builder although she comes early. It is June or July before she lays her four or five clay-colored eggs. The gold-finch doesn't build until there are the softest thistle and dandelion seeds to line her pretty nest of fine grasses. She builds it in the crotch of a tree, not over twenty feet high, and in it lays from four to six pretty bluish-white eggs.
If the orioles are weavers and the swallows masons, the woodpeckers are carpenters. A pair, working together, chisel out a home in hard, clean wood. Old red-head's nest is often a foot deep. The door to it is a round auger hole that goes into the tree, then curves downward and swells out. The hole is the shape of a crook-necked gourd. Papa Red-head chisels for twenty minutes, then the Mama relieves him. Both of them work, in relays, from dawn until nightfall. Flat-chested, hump-shouldered, stout toilers, the woodpeckers have to dig their clean nests, and then dig for grubs to feed themselves and babies. They are the hard laborers of the bird-world.
What a hurried, worried time it is for the parent birds when the baby birds are out of their shells. The nests must be cleaned of the egg-shells and dirt, and every baby kept perfectly clean. Crow babies are naked and very tender skinned. Bird babies look to be all mouths. They lie helplessly in the nests, bills wide open, crying every few minutes for food, and what a lot of it they can eat!
Every few minutes one or the other of the robin parents hurries to the nest with a mouthful of worms. The babies just lie there,
