THE SMALLER BIRDS SOI 



hundred thousand of these eggs every year. It has 

 to supply the needs of a family seldom equalled in 

 size ; hut the support of twenty young ones, or even 

 more, is not too heavy a burden for this active bird 

 to bear. With this infant brood on its hands, it 

 must give constant and careful inspection to buds 

 and to fissures in the bark, in order to catch larvae, 

 spiders, caterpillars, little worms of all kinds, and 

 thus find food for twenty beaks incessantly agape 

 with hunger at the bottom of the nest. 



"Let us suppose the mother bird to arrive with 

 a caterpillar. The nest is immediately all in a 

 tumult: twenty beaks are stretched wide open, but 

 only a single one receives the morsel, while nineteen 

 are kept waiting. The indefatigable mother flies off 

 again, and when the twentieth beak has at last been 

 fed, the first has long since begun again its importu- 

 nate demands. What a multitude of worms such a 

 brood must consume ! 



"Whole families of birds devote themselves, as 

 does the titmouse, to this patient quest for insect 

 eggs in the crevices of tree-trunks or concealed in 

 rolled-up leaves, for larvae between the scales of buds 

 and in worm-holes in wood, and for insects hidden 

 in cracks and crannies. In this kind of hunt the 

 bird does not have to chase its game and catch it 

 by superior swiftness of flight ; it must simply know 

 how to find it in its lair. To this end it needs a keen 

 eye and a slender beak ; wings play but a secondary 

 part. 



"But other species spend their energies in the free 



