The American Robin 7 



It is wiser of them to fit the nest into the 

 supporting crotch of a tree, as many do, and 

 wisest to choose the top of a piazza pillar, where 

 boys and girls and cats cannot climb to molest 

 them, nor storms dissolve their mud-walled 

 nursery. There are far too many tragedies of 

 the nests after every heavy spring rain. 



Suppose your appetite were so large that you 

 were compelled to eat more than your weight 

 of food every day, and suppose you had three 

 or four brothers and sisters, just your own size, 

 and just as ravenously hungry. These are the 

 conditions in every normal robin family, so you 

 can easily imagine how hard the father and 

 mother birds must work to keep their fledglings* 

 crops filled. No wonder robins like to live near 

 our homes where the enriched land contains 

 many fat grubs, and the smooth lawns, that 

 they run across so lightly, make hunting fof 

 earth worms comparatively easy. It is esti- 

 mated that about fourteen feet of worms (if 

 placed end to end) are drawn out of the groimd 

 daily by a pair of robins with a nestful of babies 

 to feed. When one of the parents alights near 

 its home, every child must have seen the little 

 heads, with wide-stretched, yellow bills, pop up 

 suddenly like Jacks-in-t he-box. How rudely 

 the greedy babies push and jostle one another 

 to get the most dinner, and how noisily they 

 clamour for it! Earth worms are the staff of 



