. Useful birds and their protection. Containing brief descriptions of the more common and useful species of Massachusetts, with accounts of their food habits, and a chapter on the means of attracting and protecting birds. Birds; Birds. 242 USEFUL BIRDS. tiny eggs, about the size and color of pea beans, lying on their soft, downy bed, is the prettiest bird home to be found in our orchards or woodlands. The nest is often built in an apple or pear tree in the orchard, sometimes in a rose bush in the garden, not quite as often in the woods; but I once found two nests, with eggs, in high trees on t
. Useful birds and their protection. Containing brief descriptions of the more common and useful species of Massachusetts, with accounts of their food habits, and a chapter on the means of attracting and protecting birds. Birds; Birds. 242 USEFUL BIRDS. tiny eggs, about the size and color of pea beans, lying on their soft, downy bed, is the prettiest bird home to be found in our orchards or woodlands. The nest is often built in an apple or pear tree in the orchard, sometimes in a rose bush in the garden, not quite as often in the woods; but I once found two nests, with eggs, in high trees on the face of a precipitous cliff overlooking a lake. Although the nest in such situations is usually covered with lichens taken from the surrounding rocks or trees, the birds sometimes use other material. Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright avers that she found a nest in the top of a spruce, some sixty feet from the ground, and that the nest was covered with flakes of spruce bark, instead of lichens. The nest is begun in June, and is about five or six days in the building. The eggs are incubated about eight or ten days, and the young remain in the nest usually, I think, about three weeks, although Audubon's observations do not agree with this. They are very tiny when first hatched, and grow at iirst rather slowly, for birds ; but later they grow so rapidly that the nest, which is at first a neat cup, is extended by their swelling bodies until its . interior more nearly resembles a saucer than a cup. The nest represented in the accompanying illustrations was built in an apple tree in Concord. On July 3, when the young were probably about two weeks old, the first sketch was made. As will be seen (Fig. 100), the birds were still very small, and cov- ered with down and pinfeathers. Their bills were quite short, and the quills of the wings were not developed. The sketch taken just a week later (Fig. Fig. 100.—Hum- 102) shows them with their bills fully mingbirds about developed, their bodies w
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherb, booksubjectbirds
