THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS 65 



but the waning summer cuts them short, and but 

 few species have the heart and strength to make 

 even the third trial. 



The first nest-builders in spring, like the first 

 settlers near hostile tribes, suffer the most casual- 

 ties. A large proportion of the nests of April and 

 May are destroyed; 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 cedar- 

 bird is harried. 



My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhapc ex- 

 ceptionally unfavorable as a breeding haunt for birds, 

 owing to the abundance of fish croM^s and of red 

 squirrels; 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 mother-bird, I 

 suspect, perishing by a violent death, — to the last, 

 which was that of a snowbird, observed in August, 

 among the Catskills, deftly concealed in a mossy 

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



