242 ISEFUL ‘BIRDS. 
tiny eggs, about the size and color of pea beans, lying on 
their soft, downy bed, is the prettiest bird home to be found 
in our orchards or woodlands. The nest is often built in an 
apple or pear tree in the orchard, sometimes in a rose bush 
in the garden, not quite as often in the woods; but I once 
found two nests, with eggs, in high trees on the face of a 
precipitous cliff overlooking a lake. Although the nest in 
such situations is usually covered with lichens taken from 
the surrounding rocks or trees, the birds sometimes use other 
material. Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright avers that she found a 
nest in the top of a spruce, some sixty feet from the ground, 
and that the nest was covered with flakes of spruce bark, 
instead of lichens. “The nest is begun in June, and is about 
five or six days in the building. The eggs are incubated 
about eight or ten days, and the young remain in the nest 
usually, I think, about three weeks, although Audubon’s 
observations do not agree with this. They are very tiny 
when first hatched, and grow at first rather slowly, for birds ; 
but later they grow so rapidly that the nest, which is at first 
a neat cup, is extended by their swelling ‘bodies until its. 
interior more nearly resembles a saucer than a cup. 
The nest represented in the accompanying illustrations 
was built in an apple tree in Concord. On July 3, when 
the young were probably 
about two weeks old, the first 
sketch was made. As will 
be seen (Fig. 100), the birds 
were still very small, and cov- 
ered with down and pinfeathers. 
Their bills were quite short, and the 
quills of the wings were not developed. 
Ci h The sketch taken just a week later (Fig. 
Fig. 100.—Hum. 102) shows them with their bills fully 
mingbirds about developed, their bodies well-feathered and 
two weeks old, K . 
one-half natural full-winged, nearly ready for flight. As the 
sii young Hummers are fed mainly on minute in- 
sects and small or young spiders, a large number of the tiny 
creatures must be sacrificed to supply the aliment necessary 
for the astounding growth of a week. Some authors assert 
