CHAPTKR XI. 



NESTS AND NESTLINGS. 



It is impossible at this time of the year for the naturalist 

 to avoid having his attention diverted to some extent from 

 birds to their nests. Nor would he' wish it otherwise. For 

 next to the living creature itself there are few things more 

 interesting than a bird's nest. 



"Mark it well, within, without: 



No tool had he that wrought, no knife to cut. 



No bodkin to insert, no glue to join, 



His little beak was all and yet 



How nicely finished." 



I am quoting these lines from memory, and I am afraid 

 incorrectly, but they contain the gist of a meaning which the 

 bird-lover cannot mistake. Some nests, of course, are the 

 roughest of the rough. Nature adapts means to the ends. A 

 pheasant knowing that her little brood will run about with 

 bits of shell sticking to their backs, and never see their birth- 

 place again, does not waste time and trouble in the construc- 

 tion of such an elaborate home as that of the magpie. I have 

 put a hen pheasant off her nest right out in the open in a 

 Chinese ploughed field. She had scooped a little hollow, and 

 scratched together a few bits of dried grass. At the other 

 end of the scale is the elaborate nest of the weaver bird, and 

 between the two extremes all sorts and conditions of fibrous, 

 woolly, clayey and other structures. 



It was once my good fortune to see the building of a 

 Chinese blackbird's nest < Merula Mantfurina / from the very- 

 foundation. Convalescent at the time, my waking hours 

 were being spent on a long chair on the verandah. With great 

 good fortune, for me, a hen blackbird chose that period to 

 build her nest within about six yards' distance. An English- 

 man who has never left his own country would at once jump 

 to the conclusion that I was on the ground floor and near a 

 hedge, for the English blackbird rarely, if ever, chooses any 

 site for nesting that is not in bush or on the dry side of a bank 

 out of which a hedge grows. But as we have few bushes and 

 no hedges to speak of in China, the blackbird nests on trees 

 and adapts itself to the differing conditions. In this case an 



