300 SWALLOWS AND MARTINS 



sat, and day after day, fourteen in all, till on June 12 the young broke 

 from their shells. 1 



It will be clear from the foregoing accounts that swallows and 



martins normally build their nests in a leisurely manner, giving up 



some hours a day to feeding, rest, and other usual activities. That 



these hours should be during the heat of the day explains itself. One 



effect both of the pause and the time of its daily occurrence is, as 



already noticed, to give the mud of the nests time to dry. That 



this is an effect and not a cause seems evident from the fact that 



many other species, which do not build mud nests, usually limit their 



building chiefly to the early hours of the morning. They make a 



pause, no doubt, because they need time to feed, and they work by 



preference early in the morning, because it is then that they feel most 



fresh and vigorous. But nests have not infrequently to be built at 



short notice. This, in the case of swallows and martins, usually 



results from the fall of the first nest, or its appropriation by sparrows, 



or the delays caused by weather to which reference has already been 



made. Both species, pressed by the necessity of finding at once a 



place for the eggs, will then, like other species, work in any weather 



and at all hours of the day. They will act in the same way when 



repairing damage done to part of a nest. Hepburn relates that the 



upper front side of a martin's nest fell out when the eggs were on the 



point of hatching. Though it was raining, the nest was repaired in a 



few hours, one bird usually sitting, the other building. The work had 



hardly been completed when the young were born. 2 



The sparrow is an ever-present evil in the lives of martins, 

 who are not only deprived of the result of their labours, but 

 have not even the satisfaction of feeling that their persecutors are 

 troubled by pangs of conscience. On the contrary, the sparrow, once 

 in possession of the nest, puts on airs of outraged virtue if the victims 

 so much as protest. Secure in the superior strength of his bill, he 

 sets his new house in order with all the conscious rectitude of a public 



1 The male house-martin also feeds the incubating female. 



2 Macgillivray, History of Birds, iii. 585. 



