342 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



take all the food, and eventually starve and trample 

 to death the rightful occupants of the nest. Most 

 small birds submit in meekness to this imposition, 

 but a few have learned to know Slacker Cowbird 

 and the egg she imposes upon others. Many field 

 workers are beginning to report and to show pic- 

 tures of tlie nests of small birds, having cowbird eggs 

 walled under a false bottom built over them. But in 

 this act of walling in the foreign egg I can see only 

 conscious mind equal to the occasion on the part of 

 the bird imposed upon, since it can scarcely be 

 claimed that the cowbird has systematically im- 

 posed her eggs upon any one species long enough for 

 it to have become instinctive with that species to 

 bury the egg. My cowbird, previously described, 

 laid five eggs, the one the song sparrow buried, one I 

 destroyed in a vireo nest, two left in a warbler nest, 

 and one I destroyed in an indigo finch nest. What 

 the cowbird should learn is not to deposit her egg 

 in the new nest of any bird, for in that case it can 

 be buried and lost. Where the owner has laid part 

 of her eggs and must continue to fill ovit the clutch 

 at the rate of one a day, the problem becomes in- 

 surmountable, since our birds do not carry eggs 

 around in their beaks, unless they are English 

 sparrows carrying broken ones from nests they are 

 destroying. 



My father always insisted that the wild turkey 

 awoke the day in the forest. I know that the coot 

 heralds dawn in the marshes, and the robin in the 



