he had moved two paces, he said (he had really moved four), and we
spent a half hour stooping over the daisies and the buttercups, looking
for the lost clew. We grew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all
over with our hands, but without avail. I marked the spot with a bush,
and came the next day, and with the bush as a centre, moved about it in
slowly increasing circles, covering, I thought, nearly every inch of
ground with my feet, and laying hold of it with all the visual power
that I could command, till my patience was exhausted, and I gave up,
baffled. I began to doubt the ability of the parent birds themselves
to find it, and so secreted myself and watched. After much delay,
the male bird appeared with food in his beak, and satisfying himself
that the coast was clear, dropped into the grass which I had trodden
down in my search. Fastening my eye upon a particular meadow-lily,
I walked straight to the spot, bent down, and gazed long and intently
into the grass. Finally my eye separated the nest and its young from
its surroundings. My foot had barely missed them in my search, but by
how much they had escaped my eye I could not tell. Probably not by
distance at all, but simply by unrecognition. They were virtually
invisible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry grass and stubble of
the meadow-bottom were exactly copied in the color of the half-fledged
young. More than that, they hugged the nest so closely and formed such
a compact mass, that though there were five of them, they preserved the
unit of expression,--no single head or form was defined; they were one,
and that one was without shape or color, and not separable, except by
closest scrutiny, from the one of the meadow-bottom. That nest
prospered, as bobolinks' nests doubtless generally do;
for, notwithstanding the enormous slaughter of the birds during their
fall migrations by Southern sportsmen, the bobolink appears to hold its
own, and its music does not diminish in our Northern meadows.