BIRDS' NESTS 



any coign of vantage which offers itself, varying 

 from the hole in the roof to the nest which the 

 Httle martin has toilfuUy erected beneath the eaves. 

 In this connection it may be said that the tree- 

 sparrow would appear to be slowly adopting some 

 of its near congener's trouble-saving devices. Al- 

 though in England it still nests in the hole of some 

 remote tree, in France it appears to have taken 

 on the house-sparrow's habit of frequenting human 

 domiciles and of building in suitable recesses. We 

 have a note of a colony of tree-sparrows that have 

 taken up their residence in a row of cabins in Ireland. 



The starHng, too, is curiously broad-minded in 

 its choice of a nesting-place. In our younger days 

 we looked for the starling in a hole in a tree or be- 

 neath the eaves of a building. Now, it will nest 

 almost anywhere — in the under-sticks of a rook's 

 nest ; in a vertical pipe down which it has to dive 

 head foremost ; in a heap of stones by the road- 

 side. It is probably this quality of adapting itself 

 so readily to new circumstances that its rapid rise 

 in this country is due. 



The robin, again, not content with the hack- 

 neyed bank or mossy wall in the orchard, appears 

 to be always on the look out to better its con- 

 dition. As in the case of the spotted flycatcher, 

 its efforts in this direction are often remarkable 

 for their ingenuity rather than for their grasp 

 of the exigencies of the case. Still, the shelf of a 

 bookcase in an empty room, the interior of a broken 

 lamp, the recess of an old hat fixed in the garden 

 for a scarecrow, the pocket of a disused coat hanging 

 in the outhouse — all these selections mark the spirit 

 of the pioneer. 



In the wagtail family it is in the pied alone — 

 the species which may be fairly said to be most 

 clearly closely in touch with humanity — ^that the 



31 



