re oe 
6 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 
The boy stated in his essay that having selected 
the wren as his subject he watched the birds and 
looked for nests; that among the nests he found 
one containing five eggs, and that four young 
were hatched but were destroyed the same day 
by ants. I wrote to the master of the school, at 
Newburgh, near Wigan, and to the boy, Harry 
Southworth, asking for full particulars. The 
master’s reply gave a satisfactory account of 
Harry as a keen and careful observer, and Harry’s 
answer was that the nest was built in a small 
hole in a bank beside a brook, that he had 
kept his eye on it during the time the bird was 
sitting on her five eggs, that on his last visit he 
found the parent bird in a terrified state outside 
the nest, and that on examination he found that 
four young birds had been hatched, and were 
all dead but still warm, and swarming with 
small reddish-brown ants which were feeding on 
them. 
This goes to show that not only do ants some- 
times attack the fledgelings in the nest, but also 
that the parent birds in such cases are powerless 
to save their young from destruction. My con- 
clusion was that small ground-nesting birds have 
an instinctive fear of ants and avoid building at 
places infested by them. 
But how does it happen, I now asked, that the 
larger birds that nest high up in the pines escape 
the danger? The ants go up the tallest and 
