THE LOGGERHEAD SHRIKE 



the morning 1 in passing the field he flew across the road in front 

 of me with a worm in his beak and alighted in the clover. Im- 

 mediately I was over the fence, my eyes fast on the spot where 

 the bird had disappeared. On reaching it I began circling around, 

 searching for the nest. The clover had been blown down when at 

 a height of eighteen inches and the tops had lifted and made a 

 second equal growth. I was catching handfuls of clover and 

 lifting it straight from the roots to see if the nest were hidden 

 beneath the parts which lay on the ground. 



In doing this I uncovered, not the Bobolink's nest, but the 

 largest snake I ever have seen in freedom. Its body was thick 

 as my upper arm and it coiled round and round in a great heap, 

 its head on top. When the light and air struck it, the skin seemed 

 to gather in rolls on its body, its eyes blinkingly opened and closed 

 in a dazed fashion and an undulating movement ran the length 

 of it. 



My horror of snakes is complete. One instant I stood as if 

 paralyzed, gazing at it ; the next I started for the cabin and never 

 stopped until it was reached. Later in the day I recovered my 

 senses and led a guide to the spot, only to find a hollow of earth 

 fifteen inches across, worn smooth and hard and scattered with 

 patches of snake-skin. The snake had been in the act of shed- 

 ding and by my foolishness I had missed an opportunity to take 

 one of the greatest natural-history pictures imaginable. 



One of the fields was an open meadow of short grass. A pair 

 of cotton-tails had a burrow there which contained two normal 

 babies and one dwarf, a mite no larger than my thumb and two 

 weeks old. Here, attended by the Cow-birds, the cattle grazed, 

 and occasionally, when temptation became irresistible, pushed 

 down the fence and invaded the clover. Then how the Bobolink 

 danced and scolded ! And how I danced and scolded when the heat 

 ;ruffled the temper of the leader of the herd, and, lowering his 



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