RATS OF THE AIR 37 



and the answering call to our mocking whistle of "Bob White," who 

 seemed so close at hand, yet was never visible when whistling, but 

 I once found a quail's nest at the base of a peach tree, in a thicket 

 of raspberry vines within eight feet of the driveway and quite near 

 the house. We enclosed it with a half-inch mesh wire fence about 

 four feet high, making a circle ten feet in diameter, thinking to 

 outwit the mother, and reach one of our goals, which was to own, 

 with the State's permission, a domesticated covey of quail, a bird 

 that, as it darts to and fro, is as close to perpetual motion as any- 

 thing that breathes. An empty nest and cast-off shells proved that 

 the mother bird had outwitted us. In bird as in man the house 

 building instinct is bred-in-the-bone. One bird bungalow was in 

 a deep hole in a cherry tree close to the porch. Here a pair of flute 

 voiced English starlings had their home, taking most kindly even 

 to our inclement winters, while in that rare seedling pound apple 

 tree dwelt the happiest and sprightliest of birds, the robin red breast. 

 When the tree died, and was felled, the robins moved to the veranda 

 eaves under the goose-neck of the spout-head and set up house- 

 keeping, until forced to seek the orchard by that belligerent little 

 fellow, the English sparrow that, like worry, is always with us. 



"Rats of the Air."* 



In 1872 or 1873 a Boston official presented us with one of the 

 first pairs of English sparrows brought to this country a gift, I 

 believe, from some English municipality to the city of Boston. Unas- 

 suming birds contrasted with their pugnacious English cousins were 

 the shy and gentle song sparrows whose three call notes and sweet 

 toned conjugal warbles bespoke sunrise in February's warmest days. 



We freed the English sparrows bud, flower, grain-eating and 

 nest-stealing vagrants on our country place in the Newtons, near 

 Boston, inadvertently assisting in starting the sparrow scourge but 

 with far less innocence than that East Medford naturalist and 

 astronomer, Prof. L. Trouvelot, who, while trying to breed a new 

 silk worm, allowed an experimental importation of a dozen or so of 

 the gypsy moth to escape in the open. 



Devastating Gypsy Moth. 



Massachusetts has spent millions of dollars in the effort to 

 exterminate this moth and lost other millions in damage to crops, the 

 snow-ball of devastation increasing in size as it rolls westward. The 

 gypsy moth caterpillar eats voraciously in the late afternoon and at 

 night, shunning the sun and attacking everything in sight, including 



^'Experiment proved that these bird rats would enter; in their gluttonous search for food, 

 some forms of rat traps, and merciless justice dealt to them what they had ruthlessly dealt to 

 others. 



