CHAPTER II 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE METHOD 



IT is always interesting to see how birds actually behave when 

 put to the test, and as illustrations of the method applied I 

 have selected four common birds, the Cedar Waxwing, the 

 Wren, the Redwing Blackbird, and the Kingbird. The choice 

 might have fallen, however, upon any others in my list, for the 

 principles are in every case the same. 



For the present we are chiefly concerned with the change of 

 nesting sites and with the behavior of these birds in the face of 

 new surroundings. 



On the third day of July a Cedar-bird's nest (No. 10 of table 

 on page 22) was discovered in an unusually attractive situation. 

 It was fastened to the horizontal branch of a white 

 . .^ e r " pine about fifteen feet up, in the line of an old stone 

 wall that bounded an open field. In passing beneath 

 the tree almost daily during the following week, I was sure to find 

 one of the old birds, the female as I supposed, always on the nest 

 and sitting in the same alert attitude, engaged either in in- 

 cubation or brooding. With upstretched neck she would sit 

 motionless and silent as a statue, as if listening intently, her 

 dark eye shining like a jet black bead against the background of 

 pine needles. I was waiting for the propitious time to move 

 this nest to the open field. This time arrived on July i4th, 

 when the heads of the young began to appear over the rim of 

 their nest. The bough was then sawn off, carried fifty feet from 

 the tree, and set up in the newly mown field, in an east to west 

 line at a height of four feet from the ground, and in such a way 

 that the birds could be "skyed," and the light would be good 

 from nine o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. 



36 



