The Biggest Bird's-Nest 



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magpie is little larger than a jay, but its domed 

 castle of thorny twigs would fill a bushel-bas- 

 ket. Then, too, the very largest of all birds, 

 the ostriches, make no nest at all, in any proper 

 sense of the word. The huge extinct ratite 

 birds of Madagascar and New Zealand (rela- 

 tives of the ostrich) laid eggs much larger even 

 than those of the moa, that of the epiornis 

 reaching thirteen inches in length. One can 

 imagine the relatively vast capacity of the bed 

 required for them ; but such beds were probably 

 nothing more than basin-like hollows scraped 

 in the sand or among the dead leaves carpeting 

 the forest. 



For similar reasons we ought not to include 

 the heaps of decaying vegetation thrown up by 

 the mound-turkeys of Australia and neighbor- 

 ing islands, some of which are six to ten feet in 

 height and ten to fifteen feet in diameter. These 

 hillocks of weeds, grass and leaves, are tossed 

 together by the birds by scratching backward, 

 and have a crater-like form at the top in which 

 the numerous eggs are deeply buried in layers 

 and left to be incubated by the heat of the sun 



