THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 23 
if the season were long enough, and finally rear their 
family, but the waning summer cuts them short, and 
but few species have the heart and strength to make 
even the third trial. 
The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers 
near hostile tribes, suffer the most casualties. A large 
proportion of the nests of April and May are de- 
stroyed ; their enemies have been many months without 
egos, and their appetites are keen for them. It is a 
time, too, when other food is scarce, and the crows 
and squirrels are hard put. But the second nests of 
June, and still more the nests of July and August, 
are seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of 
the goldfinch or cedar-bird is hé@tried. 
My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps excep- 
tionally unfavorable as a breeding haunt for birds, 
owing to the abundance of fish-crows and of red squir- 
rels ; and the season of which this chapter is mainly 
a chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been 
a black-letter one even for this place, for at least nine 
nests out of every ten that I observed during that 
spring and summer failed of their proper issue. From 
the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird, 
—built (very imprudently I thought at the time) in 
a squirrel-hole in a decayed apple-tree, about the last 
of April, and which came to naught, even the mother- 
bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death, — to 
the last, which was that of a snow-bird, observed in 
August, among the Catskills, deftly concealed in a 
mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted a wood, 
where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance, 
and from which the last young one was taken, when it 
was about half grown, by some nocturnal walker or 
daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hovering 
