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, even
the mother-bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death,--to the last,
which was that of a snow-bird, observed in August, among the Catskills,
deftly concealed in a mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted a
wood, where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance, from which
the last young one was taken, when it was about half grown, by some
nocturnal walker or daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hovering
about them. It was a season of calamities, of violent deaths, of pillage
and massacre, among our feathered neighbors. For the first time I
noticed that the orioles were not safe in their strong, pendent nests.
Three broods were started in the apple-trees, only a few yards from
the house, where, for previous seasons, the birds had nested without
molestation; but this time the young were all destroyed when about half
grown. Their chirping and chattering, which was so noticeable one day,
suddenly ceased the next. The nests were probably plundered at night,
and doubtless by the little red screech-owl, which I know is a denizen
of these old orchards, living in the deeper cavities of the trees. The
owl could alight on the top of the nest, and easily thrust his murderous
claw down into its long pocket and seize the young and draw them forth.
The tragedy of one of the nests was heightened, or at least made more
palpable, by one of the half-fledged birds, either in its attempt to
escape or while in the clutches of the enemy, being caught and entangled
in one of the horse-hairs by