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Updated: May 16, 2025
He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for poetry one week, for natural history the next, now spending all his spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now forgetting everything but the delights of tree-climbing and bird-nesting.
"Then why did you go bird-nesting? I think it is cruel" Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: "There you have me, Greta," he remarked. Harz began to gather his brushes: "Thank you," he said, "that's all I can do to-day." "Can I look?" Mr. Treffry inquired. "Certainly!" Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture. "When it's for sale," he said at last, "I'll buy it."
Bird-nesting in summer is wicked, cruel, and against the law. But bird-nesting in winter is good fun and harms no one, if we take only the little nests that are built in forked twigs, or on rock ledges. For most little birds prefer to make a new nest for themselves each season. If you get: A Goldfinch, floss nest; A Phoebe, moss nest; A Robin, mud nest; A Vireo, good nest; A Kingbird, rag nest;
Besides their home games, on Saturdays the boys would wander all over the neighbourhood; sometimes to the downs, or up to the camp, where they cut their initials out in the springy turf, and watched the hawks soaring, and the "peert" bird, as Harry Winburn called the gray plover, gorgeous in his wedding feathers; and so home, racing down the Manger with many a roll among the thistles, or through Uffington Wood to watch the fox cubs playing in the green rides; sometimes to Rosy Brook, to cut long whispering reeds which grew there, to make pan-pipes of; sometimes to Moor Mills, where was a piece of old forest land, with short browsed turf and tufted brambly thickets stretching under the oaks, amongst which rumour declared that a raven, last of his race, still lingered; or to the sand-hills, in vain quest of rabbits; and bird-nesting in the season, anywhere and everywhere.
We've got Gray's study. We'll have a good supper and talk about bird-nesting." Martin was evidently highly pleased at the invitation, and promised to be up without fail.
But there is one thing that I am sorry to see many boys doing every spring, and which they cannot defend by any such excuses. I often wonder who was the first to begin such a disgraceful custom, the most cruel, senseless, and babyish piece of folly: I mean what is called bird-nesting. God said to the creatures, "Be fruitful and multiply," "let fowl multiply in the earth."
One morning, as I moved softly along the hedge in my nightingale's lane, all at once I heard, in the old grassy orchard, to which it formed a boundary, swishing sounds of scuttling feet and half-suppressed exclamations of alarm; then a crushing through the hedge, and out, almost at my feet, rushed and leaped and tumbled half-a-dozen urchins, who had suddenly been frightened from a bird-nesting raid.
'I believe, said the old man, 'half the people of the barony know that their poor auld laird is somewhere hereabout; for I see they do not suffer a single bairn to come here a bird-nesting; a practice whilk, when I was in full possession of my power as baron, I was unable totally to inhibit.
And when he went on to suggest other amusements, such as bird-nesting or gathering strawberries or violets, she replied a little impatiently: 'We are too big for that sort of thing. It is childish to be always playing. Doesn't it please you better to walk on quietly by my side?
"Ay, the old Madman has got the best collection in the house, out and out," said Tom; and then Martin, warming with unaccustomed good cheer and the chance of a convert, launched out into a proposed bird-nesting campaign, betraying all manner of important secrets a golden-crested wren's nest near Butlin's Mound, a moor-hen who was sitting on nine eggs in a pond down the Barby road, and a kingfisher's nest in a corner of the old canal above Brownsover Mill.
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