1 o 
JO 
SCOUTING FOR GIRLS 
quite easy to observe and watch the habits of all sorts of annuals 
great and small. But if you are in a town there are many diffi- 
culties to be met with. But at the same time if you can keep pets 
of any kind, rabbits, rats, mice, dogs or ponies you can observe 
and watch their habits and learn to understand them well ; but 
generally for Guides it is more easy to watch birds, because yon 
see them both in town and country; and especially when you go 
into camp or on walking tours you can observe and watch their 
habits, especially in the springtime. 
Then it is that you see the old birds making their nests, hatch- 
ing out their eggs and bringing up their young; and that is oi ; 
course the most interesting time for watching them. A good 
observant guide will get to know the different kinds of birds by 
their cry, by their appearance, and by their way of flying. She 
will also get to know where their nests are to be found, what 
sort of nests they are, what are the colours of the eggs and so on. 
And also how the young appear. Some of them come out fluffy, 
others covered with feathers, others with very little on at all. 
The young pigeon, for instance, has no feathers at all, whereas 
a young moorhen can swim about as soon as it comes out of the 
egg; while chickens run about and hunt flies within a few 
minutes; and yet a sparrow is quite useless for some days and is 
blind, and has to be fed and coddled by his parents. 
Then it is an interesting sight to see the old birds training 
their young ones to fly by getting up above them and flapping 
their wings a few times until all the young ones imitate them. 
Then they hop from one twig to another, still flapping their 
wings, and the young ones follow suit and begin to find that their 
wings help them to balance; and finally they jump from one 
branch to another for some distance so that the wings support 
them in their effort. The young ones very soon find that they 
are able to use their wings for flying, but it is all done by degrees 
and by careful instruction. 
Then a large number of our birds do not live all the year 
round in England, but they go off to Southern climes such as 
Africa when the winter comes on; but they generally turn up 
here at the end of March and make their nest during the spring. 
Nightingales arrive early in April; wagtails, turtle doves, and 
cuckoos come late in April ; woodcock come in the autumn, and 
redpoles and fieldfares also come here for the winter. In 
September you will see the migrating birds collecting to go away, 
the starlings in their crowds and the swallows for the South, 
and so do the warblers, the flycatchers, and the swifts. And yet 
about the same time the larks are arriving here from the East- 
ward, so there is a good deal of traveling among the birds iri 
the air at all times of the year/’ 
