The Wit of the Wild 



I 



illustrates one of the reasons why it is not fair 

 to speak of the bird's " intelligence " in appar- 

 ently concealing its cliff-built home by a coating 

 of living moss. 



Indeed, one wonders at the bird's stupidity 

 sometimes as much as its cleverness. A marked 

 characteristic, belonging, more or less, to all 

 birds, is its love of locality, and enjoyment of 

 placing its home as near as possible to the place 

 it lived in the season before. A rural railway 

 station of stone that I know has been resorted to 

 for years by phoebes, presumably the same pair, 

 who almost always build on a projecting stone 

 about four inches below the crowning timber 

 that supports the roof of the porch. Two 

 years ago their nest was knocked down there 

 by one of the bad boys who are the pest of all 

 villages, and the birds hunted up a new site. 

 They fixed upon a projection of the wall on the 

 other side of the building, and a new nest was 

 begun. This stone, however, was fully fourteen 

 inches below the timber that had formerly lim- 

 ited the height of their nest, and the foolish 

 birds, apparently thinking it needful to carry 



*>$ 248 



