OF SBLBOENE. 
183 
conveyed off without soiling or daubing.^ Yet^ as IsTature 
is cleanly in all her ways, the young perform this office for 
themselves, in a little time, by thrusting their tails out at 
the aperture of their nest. As the young of small birds 
presently arrive at their ixiytloc, or full growth, they soon 
become impatient of confinement, and sit all day with their 
heads out at the orifice, where the dams, by clinging to the 
nest, supply them with food from morning to night. For 
a time, the young are fed on the wing by their parents ; but 
the feat is done by so quick and almost imperceptible a 
slight, that a person must have attended very exactly to 
their motions before he would be able to perceive it. As 
soon as the young are able to shift for themselves, the dams 
immediately turn their thoughts to the business of a second 
brood: while the first flight, shaken off and rejected by 
their nurses, congregate in great flocks, and are the birds 
that are seen clustering and hovering on sunny mornings 
and evenings round towers and steeples, and on the roofs of 
churches and houses. These congregations usually begin 
to take place about the first week in August ; and therefore 
we may conclude that by that time the first flight is pretty 
well over. The young of this species do not quit their 
abodes all together, but the more forward birds get abroad 
some days before the rest. These, approaching the eaves 
of buildings, and playing about before them, make people 
think that several old ones attend one nest. They are 
often capricious in fixing on a nesting-place, beginning 
many edifices, and leaving them unfinished ; but when once 
a nest is completed in a sheltered place, it serves for several 
seasons. Those which breed in a ready-finished house got 
^ It is a very curious provision of nature, as remarked by the Hon. 
and E,ev. W. Herbert, that the dung of all nestlings is enclosed in a tliir 
membrane, which enables the old birds to carry it away in their bills, 
which they do regularly each time they bring food to the nest. Tut 
young instinctively, even before they can see, protrude their hhul 
quarters to eject the dung fi-om the nest ; but if the parent did not 
carry it away, there would be a congeries of dirt under the nest, which 
would not only be uncleanly, but would attract attention and disco^ er 
their retreat. — Ed 
