. The bird, its form and function . 45° The Bird swooping down one after another upon the nests andeach impahng an egg upon its beak and flying off with would never dare such open villainy were the Fig. 356.—Colony of Great Blue Herons. Many of the more isolated cases of exposed whiteeggs are to be explained, I think, by the fact that thehabits of birds often change rapidly, while their structural The Eggs of Birds aci adaptation follows more slowly. For example, let ustake the group of owls. The majority of these birds nestin hollow trees, but even these occasional
. The bird, its form and function . 45° The Bird swooping down one after another upon the nests andeach impahng an egg upon its beak and flying off with would never dare such open villainy were the Fig. 356.—Colony of Great Blue Herons. Many of the more isolated cases of exposed whiteeggs are to be explained, I think, by the fact that thehabits of birds often change rapidly, while their structural The Eggs of Birds aci adaptation follows more slowly. For example, let ustake the group of owls. The majority of these birds nestin hollow trees, but even these occasionally make use ofan open hollow or a very shallow one, and individual,radical departures from the conventional owl-habitationare doubtless not uncommon. But these exposed eggsare soon destroyed; for no crow, jay, or sciuirrel could everresist any opportunity to avenge himself for the wrongsinflicted by his ancestral enemy, the owl. But when,urged on by that impulse which ever tends to make birdsvary their habits in all directions, some owl, such as theShort-eared, finds good feeding on marshes and open,treeless plains, it naturally takes to nesting on the ground,in nests but partly concealed by the overhanging grasses.
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Keywords: ., bookauthorbeebewil, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1906
