. Bird lore . y night,and every day used the sides for his drum. We thought he was only an oldtramp, till we found he had a wife and family in an apple limb two trees away,and used our box only as an annex. But soon he became overwhelmingly busywith an obstreperous crowd of small replicas of himself, who wanted very muchto come out of the hole but never quite dared. They silenced his hurrahingshout and made him merely humdrum and business-like, as dull as any com-muter. A pair of White-breasted Swallows found a home in the hulk of an old toyboat which had been fixed up for Martins, and they we
. Bird lore . y night,and every day used the sides for his drum. We thought he was only an oldtramp, till we found he had a wife and family in an apple limb two trees away,and used our box only as an annex. But soon he became overwhelmingly busywith an obstreperous crowd of small replicas of himself, who wanted very muchto come out of the hole but never quite dared. They silenced his hurrahingshout and made him merely humdrum and business-like, as dull as any com-muter. A pair of White-breasted Swallows found a home in the hulk of an old toyboat which had been fixed up for Martins, and they were nearly the most amus-ing of all. The poor flustered bride could never tell which of the four roomswas hers and spent hours of unnecessary labor carrying feathers and strawsinto all of them, while her husband sat idle but interested on a telephone hole they had chosen was in the stern, but the prospective mother vacillatedlong between that and the one in the bow, having succeeded after many failures. rilK HLUEBiRDS- HOME in eliminating the other two. She had made five trips in succession to thewrong hole, always hovering uncertainly before the right one, when her ex-asperated lord and master, with excited twitterings, called her out and escortedher to the stern. After that we noticed no more mistakes. It was a slow time till the eggs were hatched, but then slow no longer. Wecounted twenty feedings in forty minutes, and from occasional observationsare inclined to think that this was the rate for most of the day. Both parents 236 Bird - Lore were hard at work now, and not many weeks were passed before the hole wascrowded with small white throats and gaping yellow mouths, and then in afew days empty again and Swallows and twitterings were no more. Since the Swallows had appropriated the Martin-box, there was nothingfor it but to build a new eight-room cottage for these hypothetical was set up on a pole and promptly occupied by English Sparrows. Everyday the
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectbirds, booksubjectorn
