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 himgry 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. 



Note. — 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 

 correspondents in Australia, Mr. Charles Barrett, well known 

 in the Colony and in this country as a student of the native 

 avifauna. He had in reading seen an extract from my paper 

 on " Life in a Pine Wood," and wrote : " I believe that in 

 Australia, where ants of many species swarm in the dry regions, 

 large numbers of nestlings 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 



