THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 73 



have the heart and strength to make even the third 

 trial. 



The first nest-builders in spring, like the first set- 

 tlers near hostile tribes, suffer the most casualties. A 

 large proportion of the nests of April and May are 

 destroyed ; their enemies have been many months 

 without eggs, and their appetites are keen for them. 

 It is a time, too, when other food is scarce, and the 

 crows and squirrels are hard put. But the second 

 nests of June, and still more the nests of July and 

 August, are seldom molested. It is rarely that the 

 nest of the goldfinch or cedar-bird is harried. 



My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps ex- 

 ceptionally unfavorable as a breeding haunt for birds, 

 owing to the abundance of fish-crows and of red 

 squirrels ; and the season of which this chapter is 

 mainly a chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have 

 been a black-letter one even for this place, for at 

 least nine nests out of every ten that I observed dur- 

 ing that spring and summer failed of their proper 

 issue. From the first nest I noted, which was that 

 of a bluebird, built (very imprudently I thought 

 at the time) in a squirrel-hole in a decayed apple- 

 tree, about the last of April, and which came to 

 naught, even the mother-bird, I suspect, perishing by 

 a violent death, to the last, which was that of a 

 snow-bird, observed in August, among the Catskills, 

 deftly concealed in a mossy bank by the side of a 

 road that skirted a wood, where the tall thimble black- 

 berries grew in abundance, and from which the last 



