28 
NATURE NOTES. 
The young are certainly unsightly things, and are blind for 
about nine days* after leaving the shell. From the eggshells I 
have found in the churchyard I think the Swift, like the Par- 
tridge and other birds, takes the trouble to pack one part of the 
shell into the other. 
It is wonderful that the small naked birds can preserve suffi- 
cient warmth to keep them alive during the long periods in 
which they are left by the flycatching dam. Some of them lie 
in open, shallow nests set in draughty corners ; they have no 
blanket, and look very uncomfortable. 
I have been fortunate enough during my observations to see 
the young ones being fed, a sight which probably no one else 
has seen. The church bells are hung in a wooden steeple 
which surmounts the tower, and it is on the top of the tower 
wall that the belfry Swifts make their nests. In each corner, 
where converging beams meet the wall-plate, there is a nest, 
but these are not visible to the eye direct. Access from the 
outside is gained through holes in the decaying timber. I was 
up there one day looking after the Swifts, when I moved a piece 
of wood that was lying on the top of the western wall — not in a 
corner, but near the middle — and I found underneath the one 
end which rested against the wall-plate a nest containing two 
young ones. Sufficient light came in under the wall-plate to 
expose them perfectly to my view. I stooped down beside the 
nest, and waited for the old one, my face being within four feet 
of the young ones, which were still in the blind and naked 
stage. In about a quarter of an hour the old one came in and 
began feeding them. This was done after the manner of birds 
which feed their young with soft food, but with a tremulous 
poking motion of the heads of both birds, the mother’s beak 
being placed in that of the young one and kept there for some 
seconds. Each was fed two or three times alternately. They 
make a feeble, squealing noise the while. 
Some birds have strange sanitary arrangements. After 
feeding its young ones, the old one sat on them, and then 
surprised me by stretching out its neck and taking one after 
another four of their faeces that were lying outside the nest 
and swallowing them, straightening its neck for the pur- 
pose. It then lay still on the nest for about ten minutes, when, 
owing to an involuntary movement on my part, caused by my 
cramped position, the bird slipped off and out into the open air. 
It returned in less than two minutes and sat on the young ones, 
* I do not know the exact time, but it is certainly as much as nine days, and 
may be a day or two longer, but not more. The three young ones that I was 
watching last year, in order to settle this point, were killed and partially eaten by 
mice just when the eyes of the largest seemed about to open. I caught the two 
mice in a trap. I think the doe had attacked the birds after giving birth to 
young. This year I might have ascertained the time, but not being able to go up 
to the belfry I had to watch the Swifts by deputy, and forgot to have the matter 
looked to until too late. 
