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He has a seaside cousin, the fifteen-spined Stickleback, who is also a nest-builder. This little fish is fairly common round our coasts, living in weedy pools by the shore, where it devours any small creature unlucky enough to come near. It is about six inches long, this sea Stickleback, with a long snout, and its body is very thin near the tail.
Practical, sensible, hard-headed, a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must confess I am most grateful that she is along.
If it does not look like play with her, it at least looks like leisure and quiet contemplation. There is no nest-builder that suffers more from crows and squirrels and other enemies than the wood-thrush. It builds as openly and unsuspiciously as if it thought the whole world as honest as itself.
Upon his arrival, as a stranger, in Pleasant Valley, Solomon Owl looked about carefully for a place to live. What he wanted especially was a good, dark hole, for he thought that sunshine was very dismal. Though he was willing to bestir himself enough to suit anybody, when it came to hunting, Solomon Owl did not like to work. He was no busy nest-builder, like Rusty Wren.
To secure a unique nest for herself, when the flycatcher babies should have abandoned it, this wily personage, who was the accepted providence of half the birds in the vicinity, and on terms of great familiarity with some of them, threw out narrow strips of cloth of various colors, to tempt the small nest-builder.
Perhaps the most clever nest-builder is a tiny Indian bird, called the "Tailor," because it actually sews leaves together, using both its bill and its feet, to make a safe hiding-place for its eggs, no bigger than peas, where neither snake nor monkey shall find them.
Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to a parasite like our cow-bird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder. This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which is of rare occurrence.
Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to a parasite like our cowbird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder. This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which is of rare occurrence.
When this season is past, the excavating artist, if accidentally deprived of his abode, becomes a wandering Bohemian, careless of a lodging. He has forgotten his talents and he sleeps out. That the bird, the nest-builder, should neglect its art when it has no brood to care for is perfectly logical: it builds for its family, not for itself.
"I don't understand," he said aloud to nobody in particular, "why most birds don't know how a house should be built. Of all the birds in Pleasant Valley the only good nest-builder I know is Long Bill Wren. He must be a very sensible fellow, because he puts a roof on his house." Now, Dickie Deer Mouse may or may not have known that some of his bird neighbors were near at hand, watching him.
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