WHAT I HAVE DONE WITH BIRDS 
the whole leg was swollen, discolored, the skin cut and bleeding, 
and the bird almost dead. Release was all it needed. 
Again I came across a Scarlet Tanager a few days before 
leaving the nest, and both its eyes were securely closed and hidden 
by a thick plastering of feathers and filth. I took it home, soaked 
and washed it perfectly clean in warm milk. Its eyes were a light 
pink and seemed sightless. It was placed in the dark, fed care- 
fully, gradually brought to the light and in three days it could see 
perfectly and was returned to its nest, sound as the other inmates. 
Once I found a female Finch helpless on the ground, and dis- 
covered her trouble to be an egg so large she could not possibly de- 
posit it, and she had left the nest and was struggling in agony. 
I broke the egg with a hatpin and she soon flew away, seemingly 
all right. With the help of a man who climbed a big tree and 
secured the egg of a Chicken-hawk, after the Hawk had been 
shot by a neighboring farmer, we played the mean trick on a Hen 
of having her brood on the egg of her enemy. 
Another time some boys came to me with a stringy baby Sheil- 
poke, scarce old enough to fly, that had landed aimlessly in a ditch 
filled with crude oil, and the poor bird was miserable past de- 
scription. Warm water, soft soap and the scrub brush ended his 
troubles and he was returned to the river clean, full fed and 
happy, I hope. Walking through the woods one Sabbath morn- 
ing this spring, after a night of high wind and driving rain, I 
was attracted by the sharp alarm cries of a pair of Rose-breasted 
Grosbeaks. I followed them until almost mired in the swamp, 
and there, on a little tuft of grass, between pools of water and 
among trampling cattle, within two feet of each other, I found a 
male baby Grosbeak and a Scarlet Tanager, neither over five days 
from the shell. The Tanager nest I could not discoVer. The 
Grosbeak was in a slender oak sapling in a thicket of grape-vines. 
The tree was too light to bear my weight and I was not prepared 
