FAR AND NEAR 



dooryard flower found blooming in the wilderness. 

 With the robins came the song sparrows and social 

 sparrows, or chippies, also. The latter nested in the 

 bushes near my cabin, and the song sparrows in the 

 bank above the ditch that drains my land. I notice 

 that Chippy finds just as many horsehairs to weave 

 into her nest here in my horseless domain as she does 

 when she builds in the open country. Her partiahty 

 for the long hairs from the manes and tails of horses 

 and cattle is so great that she is often known as the 

 hair-bird. What would she do in a country where 

 there were neither cows nor horses ? Yet these hairs 

 are not good nesting-material. They are slippery, 

 refractory things, and occasionally cause a tragedy in 

 the nest by getting looped around the legs or the 

 neck of the young or of the parent bird. They prob- 

 ably give a smooth finish to the interior, dear to the 

 heart of Chippy. 



The first year of my cabin life a pair of robins at- 

 tempted to build a nest upon the round timber that 

 forms the plate under my porch roof. But it was a 

 poor place to build in. It took nearly a week's time 

 and caused the birds a great waste of labor to find 

 this out. The coarse material they brought for the 

 foundation would not bed well upon the rounded 

 surface of the timber, and every vagrant breeze that 

 came along swept it off. My porch was kept littered 

 with twigs and weed-stalks for days, till finally the 

 birds abandoned the undertaking. The next season 

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