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"Among all the other Flycatchers, big, little, and least, I can only tell you of one more, and will choose the Wood Pewee as being the one most likely to interest you. "This morning in the wood lane I saw a pair that were surely nest-building, and I wondered if they were not the great-great- grandchildren of those who lived there when I was a boy.
They kept their heads together and whispered, and Bella crooned and fussed over her and pushed the men into the background in a masterful, aggressive manner. Susan knew now what had waked the nest-building instinct. The knowledge came with a thrilling, frightened joy. She sat apart adjusting herself to the new outlook, sometimes fearful, then uplifted in a rapt, still elation.
When one was sufficiently filled, or sufficiently racked, it would shut its mouth and refuse to open, though mamma touched it gently with her beak. "The world slipped away and I was in fairyland," wrote my old friend the Enthusiast, while watching, in another part of the country that same summer, the nest-building of a hummingbird.
Imagine looking through the telescope at the face of the full moon some night and seeing an endless procession of little birds speeding across its shining face! The amazing power of birds to see and hear, and, most interesting of all, their nest-building habits are calculated to arouse the wonder and admiration of every observer.
But no; her nest-building instincts had to take the old rut; she must bring her own material from without; the haymow was only the mossy bank or the wood-side turf where her species had hidden their nests for untold generations.
It was time to go home, time to riot in crisp freshness, time to go courting, time to make love, time to possess his own, time for mating and nest-building. All that day he flashed around, nervous with dread of the unknown, and palpitant with delightful expectation; but with the coming of dusk he began his journey northward.
Wallace shared it at one time in regard to the birds, their songs and nest-building, but abandoned it later, and fell back upon instinct or inherited habit. Some of the German writers, such as Brehm, Büchner, and the Müllers, seem to have held to the notion more decidedly. But Professor Groos had not yet opened their eyes to the significance of the play of animals.
Straight away the wool is recognized as being of excellent quality, so much so that, during the three or four weeks of nest-building, I can daily witness the gleaning, now on the clary, now on the centaury. Nevertheless the Babylonian plant appears to be preferred, no doubt because of its whiter, finer and more plentiful down.
A moment to rest, a moment to take breath and to turn with his golden key the peg that tightened a string, then soft, low, trembling like the wind that sweeps aimlessly, ceaselessly through the sighing forest branches came the throbbing melody as the slender fingers strayed across the wires! whispering a song of love of bygone days when two were wandering under a glad, sunny sky in a free land, where birds in the near-by forest were nest-building, where sorrow, clouds and darkness were unknown.
As I sat morning after morning weaving my thoughts together and looking out of the great barn doorway into sunlit fields, the junco wove her straws and horsehairs, and deposited there on three successive days her three exquisite eggs. Why the bird departed so widely from the usual habits of nest-building of her species, who can tell?
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