306 
The Grow 
Killing a 
Comrade 
winging their way over the fields and woodlands to widely scattered feed- 
ing-grounds. 
Often I watched them come and go, and one night walked beneath 
the sleeping hosts and shouted aloud to them ; but they did not heed my 
presence, nor was I ever able to arrive at any reasonable explanation 
for their nightly assemblies. Surely they did not gather thus, as some 
writers have suggested, purely because of an impulse for sociability and 
for love of their kind, for I saw them quarreling among themselves on 
many occasions. 
Especially do I recall one evening when, as I watched them coming 
to roost, I became conscious of an unusual commotion among a flock of 
eight. One evidently was in great disfavor with the 
others, for, with angry and excited cawings, they 
were striking at him in a most unfriendly manner. 
The strength of the persecuted bird was all but spent when I first sighted 
them, and when, perhaps two minutes later, the fleeing one sustained a 
particularly vicious onslaught, it began to fall. It did not descend gradu- 
ally, like a bird injured while on the wing, but plunged downward like a 
falling rock a hundred feet or more into the top of a large pine-tree, and, 
bounding from limb to limb, struck the ground but a few yards from me. 
When I picked it up I found it to be quite dead. 
When the pursuers saw their victim fall their caws abruptly ceased, 
as if the birds were shocked at what they had done ; and, turning, they 
departed silently and swiftly, all in different directions. I wonder if they 
were executioners performing a duty for the good of the clan? Perhaps 
they were only thugs, sandbagging a quiet and respectable citizen on his 
way home ! 
Birds are particularly subject to disease in winter, and many perish 
from affections of the throat and lungs. Crows are attacked at times by 
a malady called roup, and hundreds of the bodies of those that have died 
from it may sometimes be found on the ground beneath a roost. Wild 
birds have no doctor, who can come at the first signs of an epidemic and 
vaccinate them against its ravages. 
Crows are among the earliest birds in spring to build their nests, 
and usually freshly laid eggs may be found during the first half of April. 
These eggs are bluish green, thickly marked with various shades of 
brown, so that they blend admirably with the canopy of green pine- 
needles among which the nest is so often placed. To 
climb to a Crow’s nest is often quite an undertaking. 
Sometimes, it is true, the situation may be only thirty 
or forty feet from the ground, but I recall once climbing to a Crow’s nest 
in Florida, which, by actual measurement with a cord, was ninety-one 
feet in the air. The nests are heavy, compact structures, made of sticks 
and twigs, and lined with grapevine-bark, grass, and sometimes with 
moss. The old birds are usually very quiet when in the immediate 
neighborhood of their nest, and frequently the only evidence one wili 
Nest and 
Eggs 
