Ixxxvi 
INTRODUCTION. 
union is broken by the excitement of love, most birds retire in pairs® to 
produce new life, to raise their habitations, and the male to soften, by 
his song, his love, or his blandishments, the fatigue of his patient part- 
ner during the period of incubation. The Cuckoo alone, of all the 
denizens of the air, feels not the claims of parental affection, or the trans- 
ports of pleasure on the birth of her joung ; she drops her egg in the nest 
of a stranger, regardless of its fate ; denied by nature the participation of 
those warm emotions, which so highly delight the whole of the feathered 
race, except herself, and placed without the ban of connubial and parental 
joy ; the season of love is, to her, a season of dulness and insipidity, with- 
out a gleam of interest, pleasure, or affection, to brighten the scene. , But 
the affections of birds in general are usually more vivid and active than 
we are inclined to allow ; they possess the most acute feeling, practise the 
most officious tenderness, and display an anxious attachment that disre- 
gards danger, and sets the voracious calls of hunger at defiance, when 
their young demand their care. The hen, though so fearful and placid in 
her general deportment, assumes, in the moment when danger threatens her 
brood, a degree of courage that does not calculate on native strength, or 
greatness of powers ; her aspect suddenly becomes enraged, her feathers 
rise in anger, and she then fearlessly attacks the animal from whose pre- 
sence, at another time, she would retire in terror and alarm. The Lapwing, 
the Titlark, the Willow-wren, and the Partridge, and numerous other 
birds, when their nests are approached, indicate their fears by their cries ; 
they will place themselves immediately before the observer, as if wounded 
and unable to fly, and run the risk of their own safety, to decoy their 
enemy from the spot in which their young lie concealed. This violence of 
affection overwhelms all other passions, stimulates the most indolent of 
the feathered race to active industry, gives a higher tone to their feelings, 
sharpens their sagacity, and places them in a situation from which the 
tenderest mother might take lessons of regard. But strong as this parental 
Some birds are polygamous, as the Cock of the wood ; but most are monogamous. 
