. Wild nature's ways . novel. She turned the tables upon herenemy by taking complete possession of her nestand eggs, and undertaking the work of nidificationfor her. I am sometimes told by people whose acquaint-ance with what I would call the operati\e sideof natural history is somewhat limited, I fear,that all the interesting facts comiected withBritish ornithology have long ago been discoveredand chronicled in books. Experience has per-suaded me that Nature, although alluringly rich,does not yield up her secrets in such an easy,wholesale way as to render this possible. Shehas her unguarded m
. Wild nature's ways . novel. She turned the tables upon herenemy by taking complete possession of her nestand eggs, and undertaking the work of nidificationfor her. I am sometimes told by people whose acquaint-ance with what I would call the operati\e sideof natural history is somewhat limited, I fear,that all the interesting facts comiected withBritish ornithology have long ago been discoveredand chronicled in books. Experience has per-suaded me that Nature, although alluringly rich,does not yield up her secrets in such an easy,wholesale way as to render this possible. Shehas her unguarded moments, of course, butgenerally insists that the discoverer of her waysshall work hard for the little he learns, and Iwould not like to confess how many hours ofcramped misery it has cost me to find out a fewthings that would perhaps be regarded as meretrivialities by many people : for example, toestablish the fact that nearly all wild birds thatfeed their young on insects like to deliver the CURIOSITIES OF WILD LESSER BLACK-BACKEDGULLS. food alive into the mouths of their hungry off-spring. If the unfortunate victims should die,through being grasped too long or hard betweenthe mandibles of their captors, they are eitherdropped to the ground or swallowed by the oldbirds, and a fresh supply promptly sought after. In spite of the jealous way in which Naturehides her secrets, it sometimes happens that thestudent stumbles upon little scraps of curiousinformation quite fortuitously. One day, I found the nest of a song thrushin a small chalk-pit close to my home, and deter-mined to secure a series of sun pictures of the 70 WILD XATURES WAYS.
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