160 HABITS OF BIRDS. 
again in motion. They all betake themselves to 
the artificial mother at night, and leave it exactly at 
daybreak, or when a lamp is brought into the place, 
producing an artificial daybreak, with which, it is 
worthy of remark, old hens are not affected, but re- 
main immovable on their roosts. 
CHAPTER XIII. 
FEEDING AND TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
Birps differ essentially from quadrupeds in their 
mode of providing food for their young. Among 
the latter, Providence has furnished the mother 
with a supply of food. for her offspring within her- 
self till the teeth arrive at sufficient growth for 
manducation; and hence even animals of prey do 
not, for several weeks, bring food to their cubs, but 
nourish them solely with milk. Birds, on the other 
hand, have to provide food for their young from the 
second day after they are hatched. During the first 
day they have, in general, sufficient nutriment in the 
last portions of the yolk of the egg, which they 
have absorbed through the umbilical vessels. 
So anxious are the parent birds to provide food 
for their young, that several of them exhibit, during 
the breeding season, more omnivorous propensities 
than at any other. We may indeed occasionally 
see a chaffinch (Fringilla spiza) or a green-bird (F. 
chloris) catch a fly or a beetle, but never, we be- 
lieve, except when seeds are scarce. On the con- 
trary, in feeding their young, insects constitute prob- 
ably their sole provision, the seeds upon which the 
old birds live being too indigestible at least for the 
unfledged young. In the same way some of the 
