220 Bird -Lore 



Then he would pull at the hairs of my mustache, perhaps thinking it 

 might make good nest material. 



For two weeks this pretty intercourse lasted. Gradually their visits grew 

 less frequent. Finally, one morning at breakfast, I heard the well-known cry 

 and, hurrying out onto the veranda, I found two of the birds taking their 

 breakfast of bread and milk — the red-tipped one and my tame one. 



I noticed at once something unusual in their behavior. There was some- 

 thing strangely hurried and urgent in their manner, as if important business 

 was to be attended to. 



Hurriedly they swallowed their bread and milk, just for a moment my 

 favorite perched on my finger, then with a whirr they were off and I never 

 saw them again, to know them. For many days I heard their cry — a singularly 

 elusive note, amongst the cedars by the brook, and sometimes saw large flocks 

 of Waxwings, which my birds had doubtless joined. Dear little Comrades! I 

 shall never see or hear a Waxwing without tender thoughts of the little 

 creatures who gave me a month of such genuine pleasure. 



The Woodcock and Its Nest 



By FRANCIS M. ROOT, Oberlin, Ohio 



THE haphazard tramper and amateur bird student are not likely to find 

 this bird. But, if about March 20, or later, we go to the swampiest, 

 brushiest piece of woods we can find, and poke around in the thickest, 

 wettest part of it, we may start up a long-billed, big-eyed bird, who wavers up 

 above the underbrush just long enough for us to see his softly mottled brown 

 back, and then slides down into the covert again. This is friend Woodcock. 



Although we may know where to find a Woodcock, his nest is a different 

 matter. The finding of a Woodcock's nest is a happy accident, not a matter of 

 searching. Two points are worth remembering, however: The nest, like the 

 bird himself, will be in swampy woods, and usually near a stream or pool of 

 clear water. 



Last spring, on April 10, a friend took me to a nest he had stumbled upon a 

 few days before. For a time we could not see the nest, but finally the roundness 

 of the eggs betrayed it. After admiring it for several minutes, we took a step 

 forward and flushed the female bird, who had been crouching on the dead 

 leaves within a foot of the nest, in plain sight, yet invisible until she moved. 



The nest was in a tiny glade, the floor of which was covered with dead leaves 

 and weed-stems. The nest was simply a hollow, lined with dead leaves and 

 surrounded by a slightly elevated rim of the same material. If the eggs had not 

 been there, it could hardly have been told from any other hollow of the forest 

 floor. In this primitive cradle lay four big, blunt eggs. Their ground-color 

 was an inconspicuous drab, with small blotches of darker brown and lilac. 



