i8 4 THE MINDS AND MANNERS 



to collect abandoned nests, but the taking of eggs and occupied 

 nests is unlawful and wicked. 



The Play-House of the Bower Bird. Years ago we 

 read of the wonderful playhouses constructed by the bower 

 birds of Australia and New Guinea, but nothing ever brought 

 home to us this remarkable manifestation of bird thought so 

 closely as did the sight of our own satin bower bird busily 

 at work on his own bower. He was quartered in the great 

 indoor flying cage of our largest bird house, and supplied with 

 hard grass stems of the right sort for bower-making. 



With those materials, scattered over the sand floor, the bird 

 built his bower by taking each stem in his beak, holding it very 

 firmly and then with a strong side wise and downward thrust 

 sticking it upright in the sand, to stand and to point "just 

 exactly so." The finished bower was a Gothic tunnel with walls 

 of grass stems, about eighteen inches long and a foot high. In 

 making it the male bird wrought as busily as a child building 

 a playhouse of blocks. Our bird would pick up pieces of blue 

 yarn that had been placed in his cage to test his color sense, but 

 never red, — which color seemed to displease him. As the bird 

 worked quietly yet diligently, one could not help longing to 

 know what thoughts were at work in that busy little brain. 



The most elaborate of all the bower bird play-houses is that 

 constructed by the gardener bower bird, which is thus described 

 by Pycraft in his "History of Birds": 



"This species builds at the foot of a small tree a kind of hut 

 or cabin, some two feet in height, roofed with orchid stems that 

 slope to the ground, regularly radiating from the central sup- 

 port, which is covered with a conical mass of moss sheltering a 

 gallery round it. One side of this hut is left open, and in front 

 of it is arranged a bed of verdant moss, bedecked with blossoms 

 and berries of the brightest color. As the ornaments wither 

 they are removed to a heap behind the hut and replaced by 

 others that are fresh. The hut is circular and some three feet in 

 diameter, and the mossy lawn in front of it is nearly twice that 



