The How and Why Library/Birds/Section II
II. Bird Nests and Babies
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One spring the doctor got all ready to put a new roof on the kitchen wing of the house. Mrs. Doctor said it leaked ter-ri-bly every time it rained. The carpenter came one Monday, early in April. But on the Saturday before, Mr. and Mrs, Jennie Wren had moved in under a broken shingle. They flew at that man. They told him just what they thought of him for trying to break up their housekeeping. The doctor laughed and told the man to go away, and not to come back until the wren babies were out of the nest.
A hat full of trash was taken out of that hole! There were twigs, grass, leaves, strings, rags and shavings, all laid loosely in a cup, and lined with feathers from the chicken yard. The wrens are fond of building, and any sort of a hole suits them. They will use an old shoe or a tin can. This pair built a second nest in the pocket of an old coat the doctor had hung up in a shed. If you nail some tin cans or cigar boxes up any where near the house, for nests, you can always have wrens living near you. In a wren's nest are laid as many as six flesh-colored eggs, spotted with tawny pink.
Of all the birds in the garden, the orioles made the finest nests, putting into them days of skilled labor. Orioles are weavers. The Baltimore oriole weaves a hanging purse of a nest, on the highest limb and the farthest twig of an elm tree. Sober little olive-and-yellow Mama Oriole is the artist. Gay orange-and-black Papa Oriole is merely the hod carrier. He gathers long blades of dry grass, strands of bark from grape vines and milk-weed, strings, wool, hair, thread and feathers. He has to find all these things, one at a time, and carry them up to the limb, that may be fifty feet in the air. Then he sits near his little mate and sings to her. He tells her how much he loves her, and how clever she is. He brags that no squirrel can run out to that nest, or cowbird lay an egg in it, or hawk get to the bottom of it. She works quietly and steadily, and sings her pretty alto with him, sweetly.
First she takes the longest, strongest bits and ties both ends to the twig. She ties hard knots, using her bill to pull the ends through tight. She does this until she has a number of loops, as deep as she wants the nest, for the warp, or up-and-down threads. Then she begins to weave in and out, taking a thread in her billand poking it and pulling it back and forth. She weaves a lining of hairs and feathers. Finally she over-casts the top, to make it strong. When it is done she lays from five to six white eggs, blotched with splashes of brown. Then she drops to the bottom of the pocket cradle that swings in every breeze, and sits there for fourteen days.
Oh how her mate sings to her! He flashes about the tree, chasing away other birds. He relieves her when she wants a lunch. He brags and trills; he tumbles about and very nearly goes crazy with joy and pride. But one morning he is suddenly as silent as the tanager. His coat begins to fade. There are babies to be fed! Both parents must work hard, and keep quiet, to feed and protect those infants.
If you find a basket-shaped nest as skilfully woven as this, but lower down in an apple tree, it belongs to the orchard oriole. The oriole's cousin, the meadow lark, makes a more loosely woven nest on the ground, in the high grass along the edge of a meadow. Above it she ties the tall stems of grass and clover together. This makes a dome to hide the nest and to shed rain. And she makes a cunning arched passage to the nest, with the opening some distance away. The whole looks, from above, to be just a tangle of tall growth. The meadow lark is very clever, as are all the blackbirds.
The red-winged blackbird makes a loose but stout nest, braced up in a cluster of cat-tails or flags, or in tough wire-grass near the ground. The eggs are bluish-white with violet and brown streaks and black spots. The bobolink, rollicking fellow, is very careful to hide his shallow, shaggy nest of leaves and grass in high growths on the ground. The bobolink's eggs are stone gray, marked like the eggs of the red-wing.
You cannot tell the kind of bird by the nest or its situation, any more than you can by the color of the bird. Here is one blackbird weaving a beautiful pocket high in the air, and other blackbirds nesting in loose bowls on and near the ground. Among the thrushes the robin is the best nest-builder. The bluebird uses a hole like the wren, but in an orchard tree or a fence post. The robins make a stout nest of twigs, plastered with mud and lined with soft grass, moss and feathers. They use oaks, maples and fruit trees on lawns and in orchards, and will even build in stout vines under the eaves of porches.
You should never tear down an old robin's nest. This is why. A pair of robins will come back to the same nest year after year. They will clean the old nest and repair it with new twigs. MamaRobin will put on a new coat of mud, using her pretty breast for a trowel. Then she will go to some pool, take a bath, make herself tidy after her dirty work, and lay four or five eggs of robin's egg blue.
Bluebirds will use the same hole in an apple or maple tree, or a fence post, year after year, if they find it vacant. Or they will use a woodpecker's hole, or a clever bark cylinder of a nest if you put one up. Bluebirds are not builders. They put a scanty lining of weeds, grass or feathers in the best hole they can find, and Mama Bluebird lays from four to six eggs a little paler than the robin's. The mocking bird that came into the doctor's garden built a loose, round nest of crooked twigs lined with grass, rags, strings and moss, in a branch of a pine tree, only ten feet from the ground. Its eggs were a pale green, delicately spotted.
Most of the other thrushes—the brown and hermit thrush and the cat-bird, nest on or near the ground. The nests are clumsily made of roots, bark, sticks and leaves, rags and paper. The eggs of the brown thrush or thrasher, are cream colored, speckled with brown, like the papa's own pretty breast. The cat-bird's eggs are a beautiful blue-green. You may easily mistake the nests of the brown thrush and the song-sparrow. Both build on the ground, under low bushes, and of rough materials. But the song-sparrow's nest is more thickly lined with soft hair and feathers.
You wouldn't expect as wild and silent a bird as the scarlet tanager, to build a nest ten feet from the ground, at the end of the limb of a wild crab-apple tree, would you? It is made of twigs, roots and shredded bark, loosely woven and lined with soft fibres. The eggs are a dull white or greenish blue, spotted with brown and violet, something like a blackbird's but more thickly spotted on the blunt ends.
The king-bird, too, builds a big, clumsy nest in an orchard tree or maple, right out in plain sight. But he is ready to defend it with much bustle and talk, telling everyone that this is his castle and no visitors are welcome. The jaybird builds a loose nest, too, but in a high branch. And he doesn't disdain to use the deserted nest of a crow. That shows his good sense, for the crow flies high and makes a stout nest of sticks and all sorts of things. He stuffs all the cracks with moss, and he plasters it outside with mud so it is often good for a couple of seasons. Besides, he lines it thickly with horse hair, moss and wool, for little crow babies are perfectly naked.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,big yellow bills open, and eat two or three times their own weight of worms every day. From dawn until dark a worm must be found every two minutes to keep a nest full of young robins fed. That means several hundred in a day for one brood!
The bluebirds forage the lawns and orchards for grubs and insects; the blackbird the corn-field for cut worms; the orioles for small caterpillars; the woodpeckers for wood borers; the swallows for winged fliers. Nothing that bores, or creeps, or flies, or burrows in the ground, but goes to feed the nestling. Wild and tame fruits and weed seeds are hunted, too.
When they come out of the nests every kind of bird baby acts differently. The orioles are cry-babies, crying to be fed even when they are able to fly. The wren babies make for the nearest holes—a water spout or rat hole, perhaps—and have to be coaxed and scolded to safe perches in bushes. Little speckle-breasted robin babies hop after their parents and soon learn to be quiet. The woodpecker babies are stupid and clumsy, and expect to be fed a long time. The jays are scarcely out of the nest before they begin to scold. The king-birds are the most sensible of all. They mind their parents, stick close together, and learn how to look out for themselves.
When the bird babies are out you can see several of the prettiest things in bird family life. You can see Papa Robin and Papa Bluebird and Papa Wren taking care of the little ones, feeding them, teaching them, protecting them. The mama birds are busy hatching other broods. You can see swallows meeting, and seeming to kiss in the air. The older birds are feeding the young ones, on the wing. And you can see many a lesson given in singing, in food-finding, and in skurrying out of sight when alarm notes are sounded. You can watch the little ones taught to bathe in tiny pools, or to flutter in the dust bath.
Such anxious, hard-working times as birds have when bringing up their families. No wonder that, in mid-summer, the songs of many are silenced; the gay coats dropped, or grown shabby. But the robin is cheery to the last, the meadow-lark trills as joyously as in the spring, the gold-finch twitters among the late thistle down, and the brown thrush trains her family in the art of singing. But most of the birds, weary and sad-colored, leave us in silence, and fly away for the winter, to grow fat, gaily feathered and tuneful, in the warm south. (See names of birds, also Bird's Nests and Nesting-Boxes, with plate.)