108 THE FINCHES 



cock. Whence comes this odd fancy ? A feather loosely stuck into 

 the outside of it (as I gather) can answer no purpose in the construc- 

 tion of the nest, so that we seem almost compelled to attribute its 

 persistent presence there to that aesthetic feeling which, however it 

 may be denied, some birds do most certainly possess. I have myself 

 seen the nest of the more ornate cormorant, or shag, gay with the 

 flowers of the forget-me-not, whilst others had pieces of bleached 

 spar sticking out from them, presenting a clean, white appearance, 

 which might have pleased the eye of a savage, as well as a bird, 1 but 

 as useless, otherwise, as the twite's one or two feathers. In this latter 

 case, especially, the limitation of the number thus used is an evidence, 

 as it seems to me, of the nature of the impulse at work. Were the 

 object here structural, more would probably be required and used, but 

 it is conceivable that one only, or a couple, might be sufficient to 

 satisfy the bird's aesthetic needs, just as one plume or one carcass on 

 her head will sometimes glut those of a woman. 



The statement on which the above remarks are founded is (with 

 my own underlinings) as follows : " One day," says Mr. W. H. Parker, 

 in the Zoologist of November 1905, " my son and I found six nests. 

 Every one of these nests had the conspicuous feather (occasionally two) 

 that we Bradfordians have noted so frequently, when photographing the 

 nest, so that we expect always to find this odd adornment.'" On another 

 day : "We found No. 1, and after a careful examination could not find 

 even the odd feather ; again we find another, not a feather in it, 

 another surprise. This, too, when we had almost come to believe that, as 

 far as our own district colony was concerned, twites never built without this 

 adornment. Only a few days later and every nest found contained a 

 feather (or feathers}, mostly the hackle feathers of the farm-yard 

 rooster." To some it may appear that I am making too much of the 

 matter, but I do not myself think so. Nothing, to my mind, is so 

 interesting or, from the point of view of origin, so important, as the 



1 See Bird Watching, pp. 174-5. The skeleton of a puffin, partly bleached, yet with the 

 feathers of the wings still adhering, had also been thus made use of, and is perhaps still 

 more "convincing." 



