BIRDS AND BIRDS. 161 



builds a warm, compact nest in the mountains and 

 dense woods, and lays six eggs, which would indicate 

 a rapid increase. The pigeon lays but two eggs, and 

 is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of 

 them meeting a murderous death every year ; yet 

 always some part of the country is swarming with 

 untold numbers of them. But the shrike is one of 

 our rarest birds. I myself seldom see more than 

 two each year, and before I became an observer of 

 birds I never saw any. 



In size the shrike is a little inferior to the blue- 

 jay, with much the same form. If you see an un- 

 known bird about your orchard or fields in November 

 or December of a bluish grayish complexion, with 

 dusky wings and tail that show markings of white, 

 flying rather heavily from point to point, or alighting 

 down in the stubble occasionally, it is pretty sure to 



be the shrike. 



v. 



Nature never tires of repeating and multiplying 

 the same species. She makes a million bees, a mill- 

 ion birds, a million mice, or rats, or other animals, so 

 nearly alike that no eye can tell one from another ; 

 but it is rarely that she issues a small and a large edi- 

 tion, as it were, of the same species. Yet she has 

 done it in a few cases among the birds with hardly 

 more difference than a foot-note added or omitted. 

 The cedar-bird, for instance, is the Bohemian wax- 

 wing or chatterer in smaller type, copied even to the 

 minute, wax-like appendages that bedeck the ends of 

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