December 
chitecture, are a most curious and interesting — 
study by itself. They vary in size from the 
eagle’s rude structure, five feet across, down to 
the daintiest of all, the humming-bird’s, only 
an inch and a half in diameter. They are lo- 
cated in all sorts of places. Those of the bank 
swallow and belted kingfisher are subterran- 
ean, at the end of long excavations in sand- 
banks, from one to several feet below the sur- 
face. Sparrows build on the ground; so do 
night-hawks and many water-fowl. To find 
the nests of thrushes and many of the warblers, 
we must look a few feet above the ground, in 
bushes and trees. Crows nest in the tops of 
tall trees, and inaccessible cliffs several hundred 
feet high are fittingly the home of many of the 
hawks and eagles. Woodpeckers make cavi- 
ties from one to two feet in depth in trees, 
and chickadees and nuthatches, with the same 
proclivity as the woodpecker, but without its 
strength, will sometimes take the abandoned 
nests of the latter, and sometimes make their 
own excavations in a rotten stump where the 
wood is soft. Swifts build in chimneys, barn 
swallows under the eaves of outbuildings. 
Some species choose the deepest woods, and 
others the orchard and the wayside. In the 
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