FEATHERED GEMS 



even let me photograph it by hand and change plates 

 without stirring. 



One day, as I was driving, a boy stopped me and 

 showed me a nest in a strip of hazel bushes by the road- 

 side of a pair of Chestnut-sided Warblers. It contained 

 the odd combination of a rotten egg, a young warbler 

 and a larger young Cowbird. After some trouble I 

 photographed the uneasy things, and, having thrown 

 out the egg in the hope of making enough room for the 

 ill-matched pair, returned two days later to see how 

 affairs progressed. It was the old story. The parasite 

 had thrown out the rightful offspring, which had dis- 

 appeared, leaving the fat, ugly intruder filling the nest 

 and clamoring for all the food that both the deluded 

 warblers could bring. Probably this is what happens 

 in nearly every case in which the Cowbird's egg, laid in 

 the nest of another and smaller species, hatches. 



The Redstart is surely one of the most charming of 

 our birds. Its song is simple, but how incessantly it 

 sings, fairly bubbling over with the joy of life — this 

 flame of a brilliant male, whose little flame of a wife 

 burns yellow instead of red, and who can make some 

 music as well as he. Their home is as pretty and trim 

 in its way as are they. It is very firmly woven into 

 and around the fork of a sapling or of some up-sloping 

 limb, usually from five to twenty feet from the ground, 

 so firmly as to seem a part of the tree, and often coming 

 through the winter storms perfectly intact, though 

 made of rather soft material. While it is not always 



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