306 The Grow 



winging their way over the fields and woodlands to widely scattered feed- 

 ing-grounds. 



Often I watched them come and go, and one night walked beneath 

 the sleeping hosts and shouted aloud to them ; but they did not heed my 

 presence, nor was I ever able to arrive at any reasonable explanation 

 for their nightly assemblies. Surely they did not gather thus, as some 

 writers have suggested, purely because of an impulse for sociability and 

 for love of their kind, for I saw them quarreling among themselves on 

 many occasions. 



Especially do I recall one evening when, as I watched them coming 



to roost, I became conscious of an unusual commotion among a flock of 



eight. One evidently was in great disfavor with the 



others, for, with angry and excited cawings, they 

 Comrade .. .' 1 r ,1 



were striking at him in a most unfriendly manner. 



The strength of the persecuted bird was all but spent when I first sighted 

 them, and when, perhaps two minutes later, the fleeing one sustained a 

 particularly vicious onslaught, it began to fall. It did not descend gradu- 

 ally, like a bird injured while on the wing, but plunged downward like a 

 falling rock a hundred feet or more into the top of a large pine-tree, and, 

 bounding from limb to limb, struck the ground but a few yards from me. 

 When I picked it up I found it to be quite dead. 



When the pursuers saw their victim fall their caws abruptly ceased, 

 as if the birds were shocked at what they had done ; and, turning, they 

 departed silently and swiftly, all in different directions. I wonder if they 

 were executioners performing a duty for the good of the clan? Perhaps 

 they were only thugs, sandbagging a quiet and respectable citizen on his 

 way home ! 



Birds are particularly subject to disease in winter, and many perish 

 from affections of the throat and lungs. Crows are attacked at times by 

 a malady called roup, and hundreds of the bodies of those that have died 

 from it may sometimes be found on the ground beneath a roost. Wild 

 birds have no doctor, who can come at the first signs of an epidemic and 

 vaccinate them against its ravages. 



Crows are among the earliest birds in spring to build their nests, 

 and usually freshly laid eggs may be found during the first half of April. 

 These eggs are bluish green, thickly marked with various shades of 

 brown, so that they blend admirably with the canopy of green pine- 

 needles among which the nest is so often placed. To 

 ^Ls" C climb to a Crow's nest is often quite an undertaking. 



Sometimes, it is true, the situation may be only thirty 

 or forty feet from the ground, but I recall' once climbing to a Crow's nest 

 in Florida, which, by actual measurement with a cord, was ninety-one 

 feet in the air. The nests are heavy, compact structures, made of sticks 

 and twigs, and lined with grapevine-bark, grass, and sometimes with 

 moss. The old birds are usually very quiet when in the immediate 

 neighborhood of their nest, and frequently the only evidence one will 



