The life of the birds, especially of our migratory song-birds, is a
series of adventures and of hair-breadth escapes by flood and field.
Very few of them probably die a natural death, or even live out half
their appointed days. The home instinct is strong in birds as it is in
most creatures; and I am convinced that every spring a large number of
those which have survived the Southern campaign return to their old
haunts to breed. A Connecticut farmer took me out under his porch,
one April day, and showed me a phoebe bird's nest six stories high.
The same bird had no doubt returned year after year; and as there was
room for only one nest upon her favorite shelf, she had each season
reared a new superstructure upon the old as a foundation. I have heard
of a white robin--an albino--that nested several years in succession in
the suburbs of a Maryland city. A sparrow with a very marked
peculiarity of song I have heard several seasons in my own locality.
But the birds do not all live to return to their old haunts:
the bobolinks and starlings run a gauntlet of fire from the Hudson to
the Savannah, and the robins and meadow-larks and other song-birds are
shot by boys and pot-hunters in great numbers,--to say nothing of their
danger from hawks and owls. But of those that do return, what perils
beset their nests, even in the most favored localities! The cabins of
the early settlers, when the country was swarming with hostile Indians,
were not surrounded by such dangers. The tender households of the
birds are not only exposed to hostile Indians in the shape of cats and
collectors, but to numerous murderous and bloodthirsty animals, against
whom they have no defense but concealment. They lead the darkest kind
of pioneer life, even in our gardens and orchards, and under the walls
of our houses. Not a day or a night passes, from the time the eggs are
laid till the young are flown, when the chances are not greatly in
favor of the nest being rifled and its contents devoured,--by owls,
skunks, minks, and coons at night, and by crows, jays, squirrels,