POKING AROUND FOR BIRDS' NESTS 139 



cut through a lark's nest, killing all but one of the 

 young birds, who were half fledged and looked 

 curiously the color of buttery chicken broth. The 

 poor mother escaped and went crying piteously 

 about the spot, while the driver of the machine 

 looked as if he were about to burst into unmanly 

 tears. ^Without this tragedy the nest would prob- 

 ably never have been discovered, in spite of its prox- 

 imity to seventy-five or a hundred golf-players 

 every day, many of them searching for balls in its 

 immediate vicinity. The larks appear to run a 

 bit through the grass before rising to flight, and to 

 settle on the nest by the same method, thus throwing 

 an enemy off the track. But if you sit patiently 

 near the spot where you have seen a lark or a bobo- 

 link rise, marking the place carefully by some con- 

 spicuous weed, and then watch the bird return two 

 or three times, you can get a general line on your 

 quarry and by patient searching find it. The 

 meadow-lark's little thatched house, looking more 

 from the top like a ball of grass than anything, with 

 its gawky, long-necked, yellow chicks inside, is well 

 worth finding. 



The red-winged blackbird and the marsh-wren 

 are perhaps the commonest and most interesting 

 dwellers of the swamp, though the swamp-sparrow, 

 the bittern, and the coot are also common. The 

 blackbird, in our part of the world, is a most con- 

 spicuous spring visitor, arriving early in flocks and 

 making lively the air over the sedgy borders of our 

 streams and ponds. There is no general rule ob- 

 served by them in nest-building, except that they 

 select some spot near water, preferably in a swamp. 



