118 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORKE. 



work full of knobs and protuberances on the outside ; nor is the inside 

 of those that I have examined smoothed with any exactness at all ; 

 but is rendered soft and warm, and fit for incubation, by a lining of 

 small straws, grasses, and feathers, and sometimes by a bed of moss 

 interwoven with wool. In this nest they tread, or engender, frequently 

 during the time of building ; and the hen lays from three to five white 



At first when the young are hatched, and are in a naked and helpless 

 condition, the parent birds, with tender assiduity, carry out what comes 

 away from their young. Was it not for this affectionate cleanliness the 

 nestlings would soon be burnt up, and destroyed in so deep and hollow 

 a nest, by their own caustic excrement. In the quadruped creation the 

 same neat precaution is made use of; particularly among dogs and cats, 

 where the dams lick away what proceeds from their young. But in 

 birds there seems to be a particular provision, that the dung of nestlings 

 is inveloped in a tough kind of jelly, and therefore is the easier conveyed 

 off without soiling or daubing. Yet, as nature is cleanly in all her 

 ways, the young perform this ofiice for themselves in a little time by 

 thrusting their tails out at the aperture of their nest. As the young 

 of small birds presently arrive at their ^Ai/a'a, or full growth, they soon 

 become impatient of confinement, and sit all day with their heads out 

 at the orifice, where the dams, by clinging to the nest, supply them 

 with food from morning to night. For a time the young are fed on the 

 wing by their parents ; but the feat is done by so quick and almost 

 imperceptible a flight that a person must have attended very exactly to 

 their motions before he would be able to perceive it. As soon as the 

 young are able to shift for themselves, the dams immediately turn their 

 thoughts to the business of a second brood ; while the first flight, 

 shaken off and rejected by their nurses, congregate in great flocks, and 

 are the birds that are seen clustering and hovering on sunny mornings 

 and evenings round towers and steeples, and on the roofs of churches 

 and houses. These congregatings usually begin to take place about the 

 first week in August ; and therefore we may conclude that by that time 

 the first flight is pretty well over. The young of this species do not 

 quit their abodes altogether ; but the more forward birds get abroad 

 some days before the rest. These approaching the eaves of buildings, 

 and playing about before them, make people think that several old 

 ones attend one nest. They are often capricious in fixing on a nesting- 

 place, beginning many edifices, and leaving them unfinished ; but 

 when once a nest is completed in a sheltered place, it serves for several 

 seasons. Those which breed in a ready finished house get the start in 

 hatching of those that build new by ten days or a fortnight. These 

 industrious artificers are at their labours in the long days before four in 



* Martins return to the same spot, or some corner of a window ; this has been 

 ascertained by direct experiment ; but the nest, the structure of clay, is generally, 

 if not always, rebuilt; and the clay, or sometimes almost sand, is rendered 

 adhesive by the saliva, or a secretion for the purpose. In their natural habitats 

 the nests are placed together frequently in contact, generally on the surface 

 of some overhanging cliff. "We have seen from fifty to one hundred nests thus 

 placed. 



