weasels, snakes, and rats during the day. Infancy, we say, is hedged
about by many perils; but the infancy of birds is cradled and pillowed
in peril. An old Michigan settler told me that the first six children
that were born to him died; malaria and teething invariably carried
them off when they had reached a certain age; but other children were
born, the country improved, and by and by the babies weathered the
critical period and the next six lived and grew up. The birds, too,
would no doubt persevere six times and twice six times, if the season
were long enough, and finally rear their family, but the waning summer
cuts them short, and but a few species have the heart and strength to
make even the third trial.

The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers near hostile
tribes, suffer the most casualties. A large portion of the nests of
April and May are destroyed; their enemies have been many months
without eggs and their appetites are keen for them. It is a time,
too, when other food is scarce, and the crows and squirrels are hard
put. But the second nests of June, and still more the nests of July
and August, are seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of the
goldfinch or the cedar-bird is harried.

My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps exceptionally unfavorable as
a breeding haunt for birds, owing to the abundance of fish-crows and
of red squirrels; and the season of which this chapter is mainly a
chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been a black-letter one
even for this place, for at least nine nests out of every ten that I
observed during that spring and summer failed of their proper issue.
>From the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird,--built
(very imprudently I thought at the time) in a squirrel-hole in a
decayed apple-tree, about the last of April, and which came to naught,