The Birds and Poets 15 



By Sunday night the nest was apparently fin- 

 ished and ready for its eggs, and then for four 

 days no robin was seen to come near it. Our 

 household, from young son to grandmother, took 

 on a worried look! Had the nest been aban- 

 doned? My explanation to an anxious family 

 was that the robins, being experienced masons, 

 knew that the wet mud of the nest was no fit 

 receptacle for the eggs, and therefore the birds 

 would wait until it dried. A more probable expla- 

 nation for the four days' desertion of the new- 

 built nest, however, is that the egg of mother 

 robin was not yet ripe, and that the nest was there- 

 fore prepared too soon. Nature lovers in their 

 enthusiasm are all too likely to attribute to birds 

 and animals a wisdom and intelligence which they 

 do not possess. Just as the beauty of the bird and 

 its song is largely subjective, born of the spirit 

 of the bird lover, so its acts prompted solely by 

 instinct, sense communications and kindred influ- 

 ences are often, in the subjective imagination of 

 the enthusiastic nature student, mistaken for and 

 mis-called judgment. 



If the mother robin really waited for the nest 

 to become dry, it is more reasonable to assume 

 that she waited from mere instinct, resulting from 

 the sum total of the experience of herself and her 

 ancestors in nest building, rather than that she 

 had any conscious knowledge that a wet nest was 

 not a good place for her eggs. 



Both the barn swallow and the phoebe, who 



