6 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 

 The boy stated in his essay that having selected 

 the wren as his subject he watched the birds and 

 looked for nests ; that among the nests he found 

 one containing five eggs, and that four young 

 were hatched but were destroyed the same day 

 by ants. I wrote to the master of the school, at 

 Newburgh, near Wigan, and to the boy, Harry 

 Southworth, asking for full particulars. The 

 master's reply gave a satisfactory account of 

 Harry as a keen and careful observer, and Harry's 

 answer was that the nest was built in a small 

 hole in a bank beside a brook, that he had 

 kept his eye on it during the time the bird was 

 sitting on her five eggs, that on his last visit he 

 found the parent bird in a terrified state outside 

 the nest, and that on examination he found that 

 four young birds had been hatched, and were 

 all dead but still warm, and swarming with 

 small reddish-brown ants which were feeding on 

 them. 



This goes to show that not only do ants some- 

 times attack the fledgelings in the nest, but also 

 that the parent birds in such cases are powerless 

 to save their young from destruction. My con- 

 clusion was that small ground-nesting birds have 

 an instinctive fear of ants and avoid building at 

 places infested by them. 



But how does it happen, I now asked, that the 

 larger birds that nest high up in the pines escape 

 the danger ? The ants go up the tallest and 



