strings are wound
around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and
loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never
the result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purely
a matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, she
fastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the
craziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened
many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to
span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws
clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up
and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest
looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she
did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she
was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens,
till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak
comes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a
loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens
it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any
particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were
the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious
method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not
something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought
enter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarely
errs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does.
The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings and
fibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind child
might do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings in
their nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. I
have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a
bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would
be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read.
Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no sign
that the bird came to grief using this dangerous