WHY DO THE BIRDS BUILD SO? 103 
catcher, always trying to have a cast-off snake’s skin 
for upholstering, because it may have frightened away, 
perhaps, some enemy of his forefathers. 
That type of all that is proper, our mourning dove, 
may be in the same category, though she shows some 
tendency to improve with the years; for that old 
broken-wing bit of hypocrisy which she still exhib- 
its very dramatically shows that her ancestry were 
ground builders, and hints her very close kinship to 
the fowl forms (Galline). Now, however, she fre- 
quently pens her eggs in by a few straws and twigs 
laid on a rail, a flat stump top, a limb, or even upon 
the platform of thick evergreen needles. But in 
structure it is a poor affair at best and shows the 
shortness of her pedigree. She is only the second re- 
moval from an ostrich. She has caught the spirit of 
the age, however, and locates her nest according to 
the emergencies—never, it is said, failing to use the 
tall cacti out on the Southern plains to lift her eggs 
and young above the preying reptiles. Even here at 
home we may note that she never tries the pious 
fraud upon man or dog when her nest is high up and 
safe, as if she knew an emergency when she saw it. 
In fact, it seems that she is often adverse to need- 
less industry or effort; for while she may place her 
first few straws up in a tree, she is quite inclined (in 
the Middle West at least) to place her second clutch 
in some already prepared bare depression among the 
grain stubble without the slightest sign of structure. 
She has lost her tendency upward these dog days and 
has gone back through sheer laziness to the old style 
