lls me of a
pair of barn swallows which, taking a fanciful turn, saddled their
nest in the loop of a rope that was pendent from a peg in the peak,
and liked it so well that they repeated the experiment next year. I
have known the social sparrow, or "hairbird," to build under a shed,
in a tuft of hay that hung down, through the loose flooring, from
the mow above. It usually contents itself with half a dozen stalks
of dry grass and a few long hairs from a cow's tail loosely arranged
on the branch of an apple-tree. The rough-winged swallow builds in
the wall and in old stone-heaps, and I have seen the robin build in
similar localities. Others have found its nest in old, abandoned
wells. The house wren will build in anything that has an accessible
cavity, from an old boot to a bombshell. A pair of them once
persisted in building their nest in the top of a certain pump-tree,
getting in through the opening above the handle. The pump being in
daily use, the nest was destroyed more than a score of times. This
jealous little wretch has the wise forethought, when the box in
which he builds contains two compartments, to fill up one of them,
so as to avoid the risk of troublesome neighbors.

The less skillful builders sometimes depart from their usual habit,
and take up with the abandoned nest of some other species. The blue
jay now and then lays in an old crow's nest or cuckoo's nest. The
crow blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its eggs
in the cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a cuckoo that
dispossessed a robin of its nest; of another that set a blue jay
adrift. Large, loose structures, like the nests of the osprey and
certain of the herons, have been found with half a dozen nests of
the blackbirds set in the outer edges, like so many parasites, or,
as Audubon says, like the retainers about the rude court of a feudal
baron.

The same birds breeding in a southern climate construct far less
elaborate nests than when breeding in a northern climate. Certain
species of water-fowl, that abandon their eggs to the sand and the
sun in the warmer zones, build a nest and sit in the usual way in
Labrador. In Georgia, the Baltimore oriole places its nest upon the
north side of the tree; in the Middle and Eastern States, it fixes
it upon the south or east side, and makes it much thicker and
warmer. I have seen one from the South that had some kind of coarse
reed or sedge woven into it, giving it an open-work appearance, li