HIDDEN TREASURE 93 



with my hands, I have no manner of doubt that she 

 would have struck me with her beak. 



In only one other instance in many years of bird 's- 

 nesting have I ever been actually attacked by a nest- 

 ing bird. Once in the twilight I had found my first 

 and last nest of a Kentucky warbler on the edge of 

 a wood. Taking a short cut through the trees, I was 

 instantly assailed by a pair of screech-owls, which 

 flew directly at my face, snapping their beaks and 

 making little wailing notes. The light was so dim 

 and their flight so swift, that I actually ran out into 

 the open, fearing lest they might land with beak or 

 claw on my eyes. 



It was on the third day that I found in a white- 

 thorn bush the little horse-hair nest of the chipping 

 sparrow. This last summer, in the depths of Northern 

 Canada, while hunting for such rare nests as the bay- 

 breasted, the yellow-palm and the Tennessee war- 

 blers, I found the same little horse-hair home of the 

 chipping sparrow. I thought with this my last, as 

 I did with my first, that there are no eggs of Amer- 

 ican birds more beautiful than those little blue, 

 brown -flecked eggs of the dear gentle little chippy. 



That same day, on the edge of the thick woods near 

 the schoolhouse, I found swinging from maple sap- 

 lings, four and five feet from the ground, the beauti- 

 ful little woven baskets, thatched on the outside with 

 white birch-bark and lined within with pine-needles, 

 of the red-eyed vireo, with the black line through 

 and the white line above her red eye. In the vast, 

 bare hardback pasture on the slope of Pond Hill, 



