140 THE COMEDY OF THE GARDEN 
hatch out her young. Even if she had wished to 
shirk her duty, Joseph says, she might have laid 
her egg in the nest of a larger bird than little 
Mother Chippy. For a bird of good size, the task 
of bringing up the starling might not have been 
so arduous. 
Here now is Joseph wishing to tell me that the 
starling has just chased the two chippies behind the 
nasturtium vines of the wall, and is there scolding 
them very loudly. Perhaps they will be glad when 
it is old enough to fly away and leave them in peace. 
As long as we lived in our old home, neither 
Joseph nor I had any idea how much and how 
often birds feed their young. We observed that, 
as soon as the robins had hatched their eggs, the 
male bird flew away from the nest, returning in 
from three toi five minutes with a worm in his 
mouth. This he divided between four open- 
mouthed, begging offspring. Then away again 
he flew, to return in about the same length of time, 
ready to do the feeding over again. So these birds 
kept on throughout the day. Joseph has watched 
them by the hour, and now believes with Professor 
Treadwell, who has gained his knowledge through 
experimenting with young robins in captivity, that 
each bird eats sixty-eight earthworms daily, or 
forty-one per cent, more than its own weight. If 
laid end to end, the Professor asserts, the length of 
these worms would be about fourteen feet. 
The robin’s nest is not a tidy little house, care- 
