POKING AROUND FOR BIRDS' NESTS 147 



parent bird would sing, once, perfectly, and then, 

 in a feebler tone, the baby (both birds plainly visible 

 not twenty feet over my head) would attempt the 

 same thing. Sometimes he would jump the fifth 

 correctly, sometimes he wouldn't come within two 

 notes of it; and not once, in the entire hour, did he 

 get the succeeding intervals with accuracy. But 

 the parent bird, fluttering from twig to twig about 

 him, kept opening her white throat and pealing out 

 the perfect song, and the little bird kept trying to 

 copy it. I suppose she wasn't really teaching it, 

 because she had no blackboard nor piano! 



The cat-bird, that sleek, elegant creature of gun- 

 metal hue, also builds in the pasture bushes, hiding 

 his nest rather neatly in under an overhang of. 

 branches, and choosing, if possible, a spot near 

 berry-vines. Perhaps that is why the pair I have 

 spoken of selected my yard, where raspberries were 

 abundant. They were serious robbers of the rasp- 

 berry crop, and during the breeding season one or 

 the other parent became a serious nuisance almost 

 every day by getting some silly idea of danger into 

 its head, and mewing for an hour on a stretch, like a 

 distressed cat, fluttering meanwhile from the ground 

 to the bushes, from the bushes to the ground again. 

 The chewink is another bird to look for in the past- 

 ures, and the field- and vesper-sparrows, and the 

 night-hawk, which, like the whippoorwill, builds no 

 nest. The field-sparrows raise two or three broods, 

 in grassy nests on the ground, and when disturbed 

 you will see them running away along the grass, 

 uttering a sweet, plaintive little note, more a com- 

 plaint than a protest. 



