54 



Wild Birds 



tree Both old and young birds remained in the neighborhood 

 for several weeks, and were still there when I went away in 

 early August. 



As an appendix to this chapter, it might be interesting to 

 add a few notes on other birds. On the twenty-third day of 

 July a nest of Warbling Vireos was moved sixty feet to an 



adjoining field, 

 and to a point 

 close to my 

 house. In five 

 minutes both 

 birds were at 

 the nest with 

 food, the little 

 Vireos giving 

 their peculiar 

 whining call in 

 chorus, and the 

 old ones their 

 equally harsh 

 and characteris- 

 tic r e f r a i n 

 kech-ech-ech-ech! 

 kech-ech-ech-ech! 

 Observations 

 were begun at once; the birds were remarkably active, and the 

 amount of food consumed by the young was astonishingly great. 

 During the first hour the nestlings were fed forty-five times and 

 during the second thirty-two times, the feedings sometimes oc- 

 curring, for a period of a quarter of an hour, at one-minute in- 

 tervals. A Bluebird even came to the bough, took a perch close 

 to the nest, and tried to hold its ground, but it was finally driven 

 off by the male Vireo, who charged at it fiercely, with erect 

 feathers and snapping bill. 



At No Man's Land Island, Maine, I placed my tent beside a 

 rock-nest of the Great Herring Gull, which contained two chicks 

 and one pipped egg, amid the loud uproar of a panic-stricken 



Fig. 39. Young Kingbird eighteen days old. "The last 

 to leave flew easily two hundred feet down the hillside." 



