THE GREAT GREEDY CHICK 35 



intervals of feeding them, she kept uttering a little 

 croodling note, expressive of quiet content and 

 affection, whilst the chicks, more rarely, gave vent 

 to a slender pipe. One of them I now ^ saw to be a 

 little larger than the other, and of a lighter colour, 

 and this bird seemed always to be the more greedy. 

 The difference, in all three respects, increased from 

 day to day, till at last, in regard to size, it became 

 quite remarkable. The two parent birds were much 

 alike in this respect, and as the two chicks had been 

 born within a day of each other, it seems odd that 

 there should have been this disparity between them. 

 But so it was. 



It appeared to me that, as the big chick was cer- 

 tainly the greedier of the two, so both the parents 

 tried to avoid the undue favouring of it at the 

 expense of the other. If so, however, their efforts 

 were not very effective. It was difficult, indeed, to 

 avoid the eagerness of whichever one first jumped 

 up at them. As they got older, the chicks were 

 left more and more alone in the nest, or, rather, on 

 the spot where they were born. At first, they used 

 to lie there in a wonderfully quiescent way, not 

 moving, sometimes, for hours at a time, but gradu- 

 ally they became more active, and would make little 

 excursions, from which they did not always trouble 

 to return. Thus, by degrees, the old nesting-site 

 became lost, for the parents, though for some time 

 they continued to show an affection for it, settled 

 more and more by the chicks, or, if they did not 

 see them, somewhere near about, and then called 

 them up to them. This they did with the little 

 ^ Or some days later. 



