POKING AROUND FOR BIRDS' NESTS 131 



second nest on top of the ruins of their first. One 

 year a pair built a nest on a beam on our dining- 

 porch, so early in the season that we had not yet 

 begun to eat outside. In midsummer, when it 

 came time to rear their second brood, they tore the 

 old nest down, letting the rubbish of moss, lichen, 

 and hair fall directly on the table, and started 

 building anew! We had some difficulty in per- 

 suading them to go away from there. For three 

 successive years, too, a robin nested on our front 

 porch, each year building a new nest on the grape- 

 vine under the eaves, two or three feet from the site 

 of the old one. I say a robin because in all the 

 three years we were unable to detect the father. 

 It was the most mysterious menage, suggesting the 

 thought to our maid, Katie, that the " father was 

 probably a traveling-man." The mother, however, 

 either was fed by faith or got enough to eat while 

 off the nest, for she reared her three broods. She 

 was exceedingly tame and would permit us to stand 

 on a chair with our faces level with hers, not two feet 

 away, and look us calmly in the eye. The fourth 

 year she did not come back. 



The chipping-sparrows, with their pretty, pert, 

 minute little bodies, tame ways, and silvery tinkle 

 of sound, hide their nests very cleverly, but they 

 don't mind hiding them on a vine which grows 

 beside a house. In one summer in our yard we 

 found three chipping-sparrows' nests. One was so 

 cleverly concealed about four feet from the ground 

 in the thicket of a young cedar-tree that it wasn't 

 discovered till long after the birds were gone, and 

 then only because a high wind blew the branches 



