38 BIRD FRIENDS 



remaining for a period of forty minutes without leav- 

 ing. In the same way the birds may protect their 

 young from rain. 



A house wren's day. In order to give some idea 

 of the activities of birds while rearing their young, 

 the following account of a day's observations of a 

 pair of house wrens is given. 



During the summer of 1913 the class in nature- 

 study at the Mankato State Normal School kept a 

 detailed record for one day of the feeding activities 

 of a pair of house wrens which reared their young in 

 a nesting-house located on the writer's grounds. The 

 class was divided into ten sections and each section 

 watched the birds for an hour and a half. The 

 young wrens were two days old. The day was a 

 typical, clear summer day with the temperature 67 

 degrees at 4 o'clock a.m. In the afternoon there was 

 a heavy shower. 



The observations began at 4 a.m., a half-hour be- 

 fore sunrise, and extended till 8.20 p.m., a half-hour 

 after sunset. The birds began to feed their young at 

 4.36, three minutes before sunrise, and continued 

 till 7.58, thirteen minutes after sunset, thus making 

 a working day of fifteen hours and twenty-two min- 

 utes. At the end of the day the records were summar- 

 ized with the following results : The young birds were 

 fed two hundred and thirty-eight times, two hun- 

 dred and eighteen by the female, eighteen by the 

 male, and on two visits the sex was not deter- 



