64 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



or grey or both kinds of bird lice which infest them. 

 Sometimes they are killed by the large grey lice on 

 the chicken feathers carried into nests for lining 

 by the old birds. 



I have gained a vast fund of experience in win- 

 ning the confidence of birds and in reproducing 

 their most intimate habits and characteristics 

 during these twenty short years of field work with 

 a camera. My negative closet now contains 

 series after series made of the home life of birds, 

 each nest reproduced where the birds located it, 

 exactly as they built it, the birds being free wild 

 creatures of the outdoors. Among the plates, now 

 numbering thousands, I have a three months' series 

 of the home life of a pair of black vultures, two 

 months with a pair of kingfishers, and a complete 

 pictorial history of the cardinal grosbeak. This 

 last series includes a number of different birds, 

 the collection extending over three or four years 

 and comprising such exquisite and intimate pic- 

 tures as a male bird in full tide of song, taking 

 a bath in the rain, taking a sun bath, courting 

 his mate, standing guard on the edge of his nest 

 beside the brooding hen, and helping to feed the 

 young, as well as the only picture I ever had the 

 good fortune to secure of a hen bird working at the 

 construction of her half-built nest. 



For obvious reasons it is practically impossible 

 to secure such a picture. To those who do not 

 understand what I mean by this I offer the follow- 



