BIRDS'-NESTS. 1 1 7 



getting in through the opening above the handle. The 

 pump being in daily use, the nest was destroyed more 

 than a score of times. This jealous little wretch has 

 the wise forethought, when the box in which he builds 

 contains two compartments, to fill up one of them, so 

 as to avoid the risk of troublesome neighbors. 



The less^killful builders sometimes depart from their 

 usual habit, and take up with the abandoned nest of 

 some other species. The blue jay now and then lays 

 in an old crow's-nest or cuckoo's-nest. The crow- 

 blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its 

 eggs in the cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a 

 cuckoo that dispossessed a robin of its nest ; of another 

 that set a blue jay adrift. Large, loose structures, like 

 the nests of the osprey and certain of the herons, have 

 been found with half a dozen nests of the blackbird 

 set in the outer edges, like so many parasites, or, as 

 Audubon says, like the retainers about the rude court 

 of a feudal baron. 



The same birds breeding in a southern climate con- 

 struct far less elaborate nests than when breeding in a 

 northern climate. Certain species of water-fowl that 

 abandon their eggs to the sand and the sun in the 

 warmer zones, build a nest and sit in the usual way in 

 Labrador. In Georgia, the Baltimore oriole places its 

 nest upon the north side of the tree ; in the Middle and 

 Eastern States, it fixes it upon the south or east side, 

 and makes it much thicker and warmer. I have seen 

 one from the South that had some kind of coarse reed 



