The American Robin 
7 
It is wiser of them to fit the nest into the 
supporting crotch of a tree, as many do, and 
wisest to choose the top of a piazza pillar, where 
boys and girls and cats cannot climb to molest 
them, nor storms dissolve their mud-walled 
nursery. There are far too many tragedies- of 
the nests after every heavy spring rain. 
Suppose your appetite were so large that you 
were compelled to eat more than your weight 
of food every day, and suppose you had three 
or four brothers and sisters, just your own size, 
and just as ravenously hungry. These are the 
conditions in every normal robin family, so you 
can easily imagine how hard the father and 
mother birds must work to keep their fledglings’ 
crops filled. No wonder robins like to live near 
our homes where the enriched land contains 
many fat grubs, and the smooth lawns, that 
they run across so lightly, make hunting for 
earth worms comparatively easy. It is esti- 
mated that about fourteen feet of worms (if 
placed end to end) are drawn out of the ground 
daily by a pair of robins with a nestful of babies 
to feed. When one of the parents alights near 
its home, every child must have seen the little 
heads, with wide-stretched, yellov/^ bills, pop up 
suddenly like Jacks-in-the-box. How rudely 
the greedy babies push and jostle one another 
to get the most dinner, and how noisily they 
clamour for it! Earth worms are the staff of 
