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Professor William E. D. Scott,



Both young birds are now going about, beginning to fly,

learning to eat unaided, etc., I feeding one, and the male parent

Robin feeding the other.


The following comments suggest themselves to me :


To go back in the history of the parent birds, they were

birds that were taken from a nest in May, 1898, and were naked

and blind, probably not more than three days old when adopted.

The usual method of procedure which I have employed in rear¬

ing wild birds by hand is to take an entire brood and nest, and

keeping the young birds as undisturbed as possible, to do practi¬

cally as near what the old birds do as is attainable.


It is unnecessary to suggest that the parent birds I am

speaking of are healthy aud vigorous, because the very fact

that they have bred in captivity seems to determine this. A

word seems essential to their method of nest-building. All the

Robins that I have in captivity, some sixteen or seventeen

in number, of which three or four pairs breed annually, are

unable to build a nest-structure, though furnished with every

facility, except under particular conditions which I am about tO'

relate. They have been unable apparently to erect a nest of the

conventional Robin type. The trees in the room in which they are

confined seem to present every kind of fork aud crotch and angle

of branch that Robins select out of doors for nest sites. After

watching these birds for two years in their efforts to build nests,

when they were supplied with every material, the mud for the cup

and all kinds of grasses and rootlets for the foundation and super¬

structure, I found that apparently they were unable to formulate

a nest that would stay together. I therefore provided them with

small circular baskets, which were at once taken possession of,

and generally the process of nest-building was as follows : They

selected various grasses aud rootlets, and after much work,

covering a period of some three or four days, they lined the

baskets in a manner that seemed to them satisfactory, when they

proceeded to lay eggs and go through the ordinary aud regular

processes of Robins’ lives during the breeding season. However,

in most cases they were so much interfered with by the other

birds at large in the room with them that they failed to succeed

in hatching their eggs ; or, if they did hatch them, the young



