POKING AROUND FOR BIRDS' NESTS 141 



river where each pair of kingfishers have taken as 

 their domain a certain stretch, and woe to the 

 fisher from down-stream or up-stream who poaches 

 on their preserves! Here, if you are clever, you 

 may find their nest, not always near the stream, 

 however, and without any cleverness at all you may 

 find the nest of innumerable bank - swallows, if a 

 colony of them happen to have settled in the sandy 

 or clayey shelf where the river has cut sharply into 

 the soil. From the opposite shore, their colony of 

 nests looks like a picture of some abode of the 

 ancient cliff-dwellers. But the kingfisher, also, who 

 spends his days so proudly and conspicuously aloft 

 in the topmost tree branch over the stream, builds 

 his nest by digging a hole into a bank, sometimes a 

 gravel-bank some way from the water. He spends 

 often a couple of weeks at the task, boring in oc- 

 casionally as much as eight feet. When a kingfisher 

 bore was discovered near the top of the bank we 

 boys used to dig in from the surface to see how deep 

 the tunnel ran. At the end of it would be the eggs, 

 or the young, directly on the ground without any 

 soft nest, amid a filthy mess of droppings and dis- 

 gorged fish-bones. It isn't pretty to lift the lid 

 from the domestic life of the kingfisher. Neither 

 is it pleasant to put your hand into a nest, when 

 you haven't got quite to the end of the tunnel, 

 and have the mother bird nip your finger with 

 that bill which can snatch a pickerel out of the 

 water! 



The birds of the deep woods are many and their 

 nests, perhaps, the hardest to find. Here breeds 

 our loveliest American songster — and perhaps the 



