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It comes to its nesting-places and departs with almost almanac-like regularity. It is a large bird as pigeons go, and becomes wonderfully tame and trustful when undisturbed. Specimens may be procured in thousands.
Bare trees would be thick- leaved nesting-places, hedges would be white with hawthorn, and hold blue eggs and chirps and songs. Skylarks would spring out of the fields and soar into the sky, dropping crystal chains of joyous trills.
They prefer nesting-places in the open, and near human habitations." After carefully scrutinizing several of the trees, we at last saw one that seemed to fill the bill. It was a small dead tree-trunk seven or eight inches in diameter, that leaned out over the water, and from which the top had been broken. The hole, round and firm, was ten or twelve feet above us.
After that unfortunate ending the chat disappeared from the little park; but a week later I came upon him, or his voice, in a private and rarely visited pasture down the road, where many clumps of small trees and much low growth offered desirable nesting-places.
In making my way from Yosemite to the glaciers at the heads of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, I camped in a particularly wild and romantic portion of the Nevada cañon where in previous excursions I had never failed to enjoy the company of my favorites, who were attracted here, no doubt, by the safe nesting-places in the shelving rocks, and by the abundance of food and falling water.
At last one of the tribesmen, a clever old chieftain, thought of a cunning plan whereby to defeat the Persians, and free themselves from the yearly tribute. This old chieftain determined to watch the birds, and find out their nesting-places; so he had a series of towers built, in which the watchmen could sleep securely by night.
A. C. Smith, in his "Birds of Wiltshire," names twenty-three breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on Salisbury Plain; but at the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these nesting-places were still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and Compton Park, Compton Chamberlain.
They were now many yards away and formed the almost secure nesting-places of hundreds upon hundreds of birds, whose necks stood up like so many pegs against the sky, giving the rocks a peculiar bristling appearance.
The House Martin is much more local than the Swallow, but still a numerous summer visitant, like the Swallow, arriving and departing about the same time that it does in England. It is spread over all the Islands, but confined to certain spots in each; in Guernsey the outskirts of the town about Candie Road, and the rocks in Fermain and Petit Bo Bay, seem very favourite nesting-places.
Going a-fishing or a-berrying is a good introduction to the haunts of the birds, and to their nesting-places. You put forth your hand for the berries, and there is a nest; or your tread by the creeks starts the sandpiper or the water-thrush from the ground where its eggs are concealed, or some shy wood-warbler from a bush.
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