LIFE IN A PINE WooD 13 
seemingly mad violent action, yet accomplished 
with such ease, such certainty, such grace, I was 
astonished afresh. 
This would be the last act in the day’s business, 
for immediately afterwards they would fly to the 
roosting-place and the hungry young would hush 
their cries. 
Then at the end of the third week in September 
the whole family disappeared. The young had now 
to learn that they could not always stay in the 
one place which they knew, soon to be followed 
with the last and hardest of all their lessons, that 
they must make their own living or else starve. 
Norre.—Since this paper appeared in the National Review, 
my idea concerning the destructiveness of ants to young birds 
has received further confirmation from two widely separated 
quarters. One, oddly enough, is contained in another country 
schoolboy essay, for a Bird and Tree Day Competition, in 
this case from a village in Hampshire. The skylark was the 
bird observed, and on one of the visits the little observer paid 
to the nest, when the nestlings were a few days old, he found 
them outside of the nest covered with small red ants and in a 
dying condition. 
The second case is contained in a letter from one of my cor- 
respondents in Australia, Mr. Charles Barrett, well known in 
the Colony and in this country as a student of the native avi- 
fauna. He had in reading seen an extract from my paper on 
“Life in a Pine Wood,” and wrote: “I believe that in Aus- 
tralia, where ants of many species swarm in the dry regions, 
large numbers of nestings fall victims to these insects. Of 
course it is the birds that nest on the ground that suffer the 
most, but some of the ants ascend trees and attack the fledge- 
lings in nests in the highest branches. . . . In November I 
noticed a stream of large reddish ants streaming up a gum 
sapling, and found it was pouring into a nest of wood swallows, 
Artamus sarolida, which contained three chicks about a week 
