48 NESTS AND EGGS OF BIRDS. 



to mac rivers, and notwcst of Kansas and Iowa. South of Can- 

 ada it is resident throughout the year, and breeds in large 

 numbers, but in out-ot-thc-\vay positions where it hides its 

 habitation with great skill. Thus it was never my good luck 

 to find a chickadee's nest, but John Burroughs, the most de- 

 lightful writer about birds in America, describes in his little 

 book. Wake Robin, how he found one in the Catskill region 

 of New York state. It gives us a good idea of how hard a 

 prize it is to secure. He says : — 



I recently discovered one of these nests, in a most interesting situa- 

 tion. The tree containing it, a variety of the wild-cherry, stood upon 

 the brink of the bald summit of a high mountain. Gray, time-worn 

 rocks lay piled loosely about, or overtoppled the just-visible byways of 

 the red fox. The trees had a half-seared look, and that indescribable 

 wildness, which lurks about tlie tops of all remote mountains, possessed 

 the place. The parent birds attracted my attention by appearing with 

 food in their beaks, and by seeming much put out. Yet so wary were 

 they of revealing the locality of their brood, or even of the precise tree 

 that held them, that I lurked around over an hour without gaining a 

 point on them. Finally, a bright and curious boy who accompanied me 

 secreted himself under a low projecting rock, close to the tree in which 

 we supposed the nest to be, while I moved off around the mountain- 

 side. It was not long before the youth had their secret. The tree, 

 which was low and wide-branching, and overrun with lichens, appeared 

 at a cursory glance to contain not one dry or decayed limb, yet there 

 was one a few feet long, in which, when my eyes were piloted thither, 

 I detected a small round orifice. As my weight began to shake the 

 branches the consternation of both old and young was great. The 

 stump of a limb that held the nest was about three inches thick, and at 

 the bottom of the tunnel was excavated quite to the bark. With my 

 thumb-nail I broke in the thin wall, and the yoimg, which were full- 

 fledged, looked out upon the world for the first time. 



Then each one of the young "with a significant chirp as much 

 as to say, ' It is time we were out of this,' " scrambled to the 

 edge and launched ofi' upon its untried wings, contemptuously 

 saluting the abandoned nest, with its excrement. 



While the chickadee seems to prefer such wild places as 

 this, in New England " a hollow post of a fence in the midst 

 of open cultivated fields, a decayed stump near the side of a 

 public highwav, a hollow log in a frequented farmyard, and 



