Bird Neighbors 



235 



will come to us next spring. But, in any case, we are glad that his heart- 

 broken calls have ceased to harrow our feelings. 



In the meantime, there was domesticity on all sides. A joyous, noisy Flicker 

 had found his box, and, regardless of a Sparrow's nest in the bottom and angry, 

 screaming Sparrows on all sides, calmly took up his abode there every night, 

 and every day used the sides for his drum. We thought he was only an old 

 tramp, till we found he had a wife and family in an apple limb two trees away, 

 and used our box only as an annex. But soon he became overwhelmingly busy 

 with an obstreperous crowd of small replicas of himself, who wanted very much 

 to come out of the hole but never quite dared. They silenced his hurrahing 

 shout and made him merely humdrum and business-like, as dull as any com- 

 muter. 



A pair of White-breasted Swallows found a home in the hulk of an old toy 

 boat which had been fixed up for Martins, and they were nearly the most amus- 

 ing of all. The poor flustered bride could never tell which of the four rooms 

 was hers and spent hours of unnecessary labor carrying feathers and straws 

 into all of them, while her husband sat idle but interested on a telephone wire. 

 The hole they had chosen was in the stern, but the prospective mother vacillated 

 long between that and the one in the bow, having succeeded after many failures 



rilK HLUEBiRDS- HOME 



in eliminating the other two. She had made five trips in succession to the 

 wrong hole, always hovering uncertainly before the right one, when her ex- 

 asperated lord and master, with excited twitterings, called her out and escorted 

 her to the stern. After that we noticed no more mistakes. 



It was a slow time till the eggs were hatched, but then slow no longer. We 

 counted twenty feedings in forty minutes, and from occasional observations 

 are inclined to think that this was the rate for most of the day. Both parents 



