YELLOW OR ORANGE CONSPICUOUS 513 
incubation. This lasts thirteen days, and the young re- 
main in the nursery twelve days longer, leaving it before 
they are able either to fly or to perch. Yet so protec- 
tive is their coloring and so jealously does the long grass 
guard its secret that, search as you may within a circle 
where you know they are hidden, you will not find one 
of them. For two weeks longer they remain with their 
parents, learnng to hunt grasshoppers, beetles, and 
crickets, to hide in the shadow of a green tuft, to bathe 
in the shallows at the brook’s edge, and last of all, to 
perch in low bushes at night with others of their kind. 
As soon as they have mastered these things, they are 
able to provide for themselves and are abandoned by 
the parents. I have a theory that the young of 
each year go some distance south in companies guided 
by one or two adults, returning either the next spring 
or the second season. Some species of birds do not 
mature fully until two years old, and this seems to be 
true of Meadowlarks. 
Meanwhile the parents have begun preparations for 
rearing another brood in the same meadow, but not the 
same nest. The sun being hotter, this second cradle is 
more carefully sheltered from its rays by the pulling over 
of the surrounding grass, and sometimes a runway is 
made to it, extending four or five feet away. By this 
the old birds enter and leave the nest proper. 
Dr. Coues, in “ Birds of the Northwest,” writes of 
some peculiar habits of the Western Meadowlark as 
follows : 
33 
