THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 23 



if the season were long enough, and finally rear their 

 family, but the waning summer cuts them short, and 

 but few species have the heart and strength to make 

 even the third trial, n^ 



/* The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers 

 near hostile tribes, suffer the most casualties. A la/ge 

 proportion of the nests of April and May are de* 

 stroyed ; their enemies have been many months without 

 eggs, and their appetites are keen for them. It is a 

 time, too, when other food is scarce, and the crows 

 and squirrels are hard put. But the second nests of 

 June, and still more the nests of July and August, 

 are seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of 

 the goldfinch or the cedar-bird is harried. 



My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps excep- 

 tionally unfavorable as a breeding haunt for birds, 

 owing to the abundance of fish-crows and of red squir- 

 rels ; and the season of which this chapter is mainly 

 a chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been 

 a black-letter one even for this place, for at least nine 

 nests out of every ten that I observed during that 

 spring and summer failed of their proper issue. From 

 the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird, 

 • — built (very imprudently I thought at the time) in 

 a squirrel-hole in a decayed apple-tree, about the last 

 of April, and which came to naught, even the moiher- 

 bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death, — to 

 ;he iast, which was that of a snow-bird, observed ifl 

 August, among the Catskills, deftly concealed in a 

 mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted a wood, 

 where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance, 

 and from which the last young one was taken, when H 

 was about half grown, by some nocturnal walker or 

 daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hovering 



