A Summer With the Bluebirds 



43 



tame enough to alight on the hand, but he would come close enough to 

 pick the worms out of it. 



Bluet and Twinklewing had found water and food, and there were about 

 twenty suitable houses within a stone's throw. However, I wanted them 

 to nest closer to the window, and so made and put up a new house in the 

 cherry tree, just where I could study them to best advantage. I hardly 

 dared hope that they would go into it, there were so many other house 

 about. Very soon their desire for a home eclipsed even their appetite for 

 mealworms. They tried every house on the premises and might be gone — 

 presumably house -hunting — for a day 

 or two at a time. But at last, to my 

 delight, Bluet began carrying billfuls of 

 pine needles into my house in the 

 cherry tree. But then, when the nest 

 was finished, they seemed to pay no 

 attention to it for nearly a week. Soon 

 after that, however, there were five 

 blue eggs and Bluet was brooding, or — 

 as I thought — ought to 'have been. 

 She was certainly off the nest more 

 than half the time in daylight, flying 

 about catching insects and enjoying her- 

 self generally. I was tempted to rate 

 her as a shiftless mother, and did not 

 believe that she would hatch a single 

 egg. She did spend her nights on the 

 nest and, after she had gone in and it 

 was beginning to grow dark. Twinkle- 

 wing would hang with his head in the 

 box for minutes at a time, while a 

 queer series of good-night squeaks could be heard. Then he would fly 

 away, and I could not discover where he slept. 



I was glad to admit that Bluet knew more about hatching her eggs than 

 I did, for they all came out May eleventh and all grew to maturity. The 

 seventeenth day after hatching, the young ones sat for their pictures and 

 betook themselves to the tree-tops. I left the nest undisturbed, but, while 

 the parents continued to come to the window for worms, I did not see a 

 Bluebird pay the least attention to it for the rest of the season. 



It would take a book to tell all the pleasure and entertainment and 

 opportunity for study they furnished. Several of my students worked their 

 laboratory periods recording the number of insects brought to the nest, but 

 the best students of all were the children, who daily had a story to tell of 

 the Bluebirds catching insects in the garden or taking their baths in the 



THE HOME IN THE CHERRY TREE 

 FIRST BROOD OF FIVE 



