NATURE AND THE POETS 



I will cite here two instances in which his natural 

 history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink 

 he makes the parent birds feed their young with 

 " seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclu- 

 sively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is 

 an insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood 

 has flown, and a granivorous bird in the South. 

 In his " Evening Revery " occur these lines : 



"The mother bird hath broken for her brood 

 Their prison shells, or shoved them from the nest, 

 Plumed for their earliest flight." 



It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her 

 offspring in escaping from the shell. The young of 

 all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or 

 protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they 

 are so placed in the shell that this point is in imme- 

 diate contact with its inner surface ; as soon as they 

 are fully developed and begin to struggle to free 

 themselves, the horny growth "pips" the shell. 

 Their efforts then continue till their prison walls 

 are completely sundered and the bird is free. This 

 process is rendered the more easy by the fact that 

 toward the last the shell becomes very rotten; the 

 acids that are generated by the growing chick eat it 

 and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch 

 a fully incubated bird's egg without breaking it. 

 To help the young bird forth would insure its speedy 

 death. It is not true, either, that the parent shoves 

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