io8 BIRDS OF THE PLAINS 



writes Hudson, "the young robin when ejected fell a 

 distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a broad, 

 light green leaf, where it was an exceedingly con- 

 spicuous object ; and when the mother robin was on 

 the nest — and at that stage she was on it the greater 

 part of the time — warming that black-skinned, toad- 

 like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelligent eyes 

 were looking full at the other one, just beneath her, 

 which she had grown in her body and had hatched with 

 her warmth, and was her very own, I watched her for 

 hours ; watched her when warming the cuckoo, when 

 she left the nest, and when she returned with food and 

 warmed it again, and never once did she pay the least 

 attention to the outcast lying there close to her. There 

 on its green leaf it remained, growing colder by degrees, 

 hour by hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head 

 as if to receive food, then dropped it again, and when at 

 intervals it twitched its body as if trying to move. 

 During the evening even these slight motions ceased, 

 though the feeblest flame of life was not yet extinct ; 

 but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and 

 just above it, her bright eyes upon it, the mother robin 

 sat on the nest as before warming the cuckoo." 



Even those actions of nesting birds which appear to 

 be most intelligent can be shown to be merely automatic. 

 Take, for example, the curious habit of feigning injury, 

 which some birds have, when an enemy approaches the 

 young, in order to distract attention from them to itself 

 and thus enable them to seek cover unobserved. This 

 surely seems a highly intelligent act. But birds some- 

 times act thus before the eggs are hatched, and by so 



