304 The Bird 
with spots of lichen and sunlight, seems to have gendered 
these baby birds. Yet they were hatched in a dark hole 
from the whitest of white eggs. Is this and a thousand 
of other resemblances to be termed accidental? Then 
is all Nature one great accident! When the Flicker flies 
with swift wing-beat from tree to tree, then the white 
Fie. 241.—Laughing Gull on nest. 
rump blazes forth. At such moment no protection is 
needed; but in these young Flickers upon the tree-trunk, 
how exquisitely do their spots deceive the eye! They 
are, we say, perhaps sunlight splashes,—nothing more. 
Yet others which, like the Brown Creeper, haunt the 
tree-trunks of the forest, seem veritably to be but stray 
bits of roughened bark creeping here and there. 
