137 



more ashamed of ray unbelief. And now that T too have forfeited all 

 ■claim to be believed I shall only ask you to listen to a few more of my 

 bird yarns, selecting such as will not lay too great a strain on your 

 imaginative powers. 



It often puzzled me how birds did for water in winter when snow 

 and ice covered almost all the available t sources of supply, and open water 

 was to be had in but few places. The most natural solution (in more 

 senses than one) of the difficulty did not occur to me till I happened to 

 observe a Goldfinch eating snow in February. 



If 1 am not mistaken the tail, in its capacity of rudder, is generally 

 supposed to be an indispensable part of a birds outfit, and I must confess 

 to a similar opinion, held till August of last year, when I saw in broad 

 daylight, and watched for some time, a Night Hawk so utterly devoid 

 of tail that it seemed as if the after half of the body had been chopped 

 off with it. And yet this bird was hawking for its daily meal of insects, 

 among its brothers, and performing all those graceful aerial evolutions 

 for which the species is noted, with apparently as much ease as *ny of 

 them. I also read in the last number of the Ornithologist and Oologist* 

 (one of our exchanges), of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo without a tail having 

 been observed on its nest, and the question at once suggested itself, by 

 what kind of accident are birds deprived of this useful appendage, or do 

 these instances merely indicate the beginnings of a new phase of avian 

 evolution, analogous to that by which man has attained his present tail- 

 less eminence 1 



Though birds in general conform more or less strictly to certain 

 rules in the selection of their building materials, we occasionally find an 

 individual who sets these rules at defiance, and displays the originality 

 of a master mind in the selection. For instance a Robin's nest found 

 in this vicinity a year or two ago embodied in its composition art, 

 literature, finance, and the manufactures, art being represented by a 

 skein of colored embroidery silk, literature by a newspaper clipping, 

 finance by a cancelled cheque on the Bank of British North America, 

 and a fragment of a promissory note, and the manufactures by a piece 

 checked cotton shirting. It will be noticed that the builder showed 

 great impartiality except perhaps, as aboy^ indicated, an undue prefer- 

 ence for checks. 





