e spring
when Nature's pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping
time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the
winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly
rejoicing together!

Next morning, when we climbed to the precious jay nest to take another
admiring look at the eggs, we found it empty. Not a shell-fragment was
left, and we wondered how in the world the birds were able to carry
off their thin-shelled eggs either in their bills or in their feet
without breaking them, and how they could be kept warm while a new
nest was being built. Well, I am still asking these questions. When I
was on the Harriman Expedition I asked Robert Ridgway, the eminent
ornithologist, how these sudden flittings were accomplished, and he
frankly confessed that he didn't know, but guessed that jays and many
other birds carried their eggs in their mouths; and when I objected
that a jay's mouth seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that
birds' mouths were larger than the narrowness of their bills
indicated. Then I asked him what he thought they did with the eggs
while a new nest was being prepared. He didn't know; neither do I to
this day. A specimen of the many puzzling problems presented to the
naturalist.

We soon found many more nests belonging to birds that were not half so
suspicious. The handsome and notorious blue jay plunders the nests of
other birds and of course he could not trust us. Almost all the
others--brown thrushes, bluebirds, song sparrows, kingbirds,
hen-hawks, nighthawks, whip-poor-wills, woodpeckers, etc.--simply
tried to avoid being seen, to draw or drive us away, or paid no
attention to us.

We used to wonder how the woodpeckers could bore holes so perfectly
round, true mathematical circles. We ourselves could not have done it
even with gouges and chisels. We loved to watch them feeding their
young, and wondered how they could glean food enough for so many
clamorous, hungry, unsatisfiable babies, and how they managed to give
each one its share; for after the young grew strong, one would get
his head out of the door-hole and try to hold possession of it to meet
the food-laden parents. How hard they worked to support their
families, especially the red-headed and speckledy woodpeckers and
flickers; digging, hammering on scaly bark and decaying trunks and
branches from dawn to dark, coming and going at intervals of a few
minutes all the livelong day!

We di