CORBIE 



There was not down on their bodies to make them fluffy 

 and pretty, like Peter Piper's children. They were just 

 sprawling little bits of crow-life, so helpless that it would 

 have been quite pitiful if they had not had a good patient 

 mother and a father who seemed never to get tired of 

 hunting for food. 



Now, it takes a very great deal of food for five young 

 crows, because each one on some days will eat more than 

 half his own weight and beg for more. Dear, dear! how 

 they did beg! Every time either Father or Mother 

 Crow came back to the nest, those five beaks would open 

 so wide that the babies seemed to be yawning way down 

 to the end of their red throats. Oh, the food that got 

 stuffed into them ! Good and nourishing, every bit of it ; 

 for a proper diet is as important to a bird baby as to a 

 human one. Juicy caterpillars — a lot of them: enough 

 to eat up a whole berry-patch if the crows had n't found 

 them; nutty-flavored grasshoppers — a lot of them, too; 

 so many, in fact, that it looked very much as if crows 

 were the reason the grasshoppers were so nearly wiped 

 out that year that they did n't have a chance to trouble 

 the farmers' crops; and now and then a dainty egg was 

 served them in the most tempting crow-fashion, that is, 

 right from the beak of the parent. 



For, as you no doubt have heard, a crow thinks no 

 more of helping himself to an egg of a wild bird than we 



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