The Lay of the Band 
the first summer to meet the increasing weight of 
the growing body. 
Where there are peculiar uses made of the tail, as 
with the chimney swifts and woodpeckers, there is a 
peculiar order of moulting. In most birds the tail is 
a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not of equal 
importance with the wings. Nature, consequently, 
seems to have attached less importance to the feath- 
ers of the tail, They are not so firmly set, and they 
are hardly of the same quality or kind; for if a wing 
feather is once broken or lost, after the moult, it must 
go unmended until the annual moulting time comes 
round again; whereas, if a tail feather is lost through 
accident, it is made good, no matter when. How 
do you explain that? I know that old theory of the 
birds roosting with their tails out, and so, through 
generations of lost tails, those feathers now grow, 
expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and so have 
only a temporary hold. Perhaps. 
The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a 
lost feather with a new one as soon as possible; but 
in order to give extra strength to the wing feathers 
nature has found it necessary to check their frequent 
change, and so complete is the check that the annual 
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