UNDER THE MAPLES 



artistry. On the newly sawn timbers of your 

 porch or woodshed it is far less pleasing, because 

 the bird's art, bcrn of rocky ledges, only serves in 

 the new environment to make its nest conspicu- 

 ous. 



Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper 

 sparrow fly up and alight on the telephone wire with 

 nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye upon 

 her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy 

 and weedy bank of the roadside in front of me and 

 disappears. A few moments later I have her 

 secret — a nest in a little recess in the bank. That 

 straw gave the finishing touch. She kept her 

 plac^e on the nest until she had deposited her first 

 egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this 

 season. Some young vespers flitting about farther 

 up the road are presumably her first brood. Each 

 day thereafter for four consecutive days she added 

 an egg. Incubation soon began and on the 

 10th of July the young were out, the little sprawl- 

 ing, skinny things looking, as a city girl said 

 when she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a 

 nest, as if they were mildewed. 



These ground-builders among the birds, taking 

 their chances in the great common of the open 

 fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every hour — 

 the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, 

 weasels, coons by night, and crows and hawks by 

 day — what bird-lover does not experience a little 



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