146 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our ear- 
liest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees 
with their nests; the Song Sparrow seeks the 
ground; the Bluebird finds a box or a hole 
somewhere; the Red-winged Blackbird haunts 
the marshy thickets, safer in spring than at 
any other season; and even the sociable Robin 
prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved 
to begin housekeeping prematurely. The move- 
ments of birds are chiefly timed by the advance 
of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly 
surprising about them is not the general fact of 
the change of latitude, but their accuracy in 
hitting the precise locality. That the same 
Catbird should find its way back, every spring, 
to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree, 
—that is the thing astonishing tome. In Eng- 
land, a lame Redstart was observed in the same 
garden for sixteen successive years; and the 
astonishing precision of course which enables 
some birds of small size to fly from Australia 
to New Zealand in a day — probably the long- 
est single flight ever taken —is only a part of 
the same mysterious instinct of direction. 
In comparing modes of flight, the most sur- 
prising, of course, is that of the Swallow tribe, 
remarkable not merely for its velocity, but for 
the amazing boldness and instantaneousness of 
the angles it makes; so that eminent European 
