File:Birds and nature in natural colors - being a scientific and popular treatise on four hundred birds of the United States and Canada (1913) (14568587080).jpg

Identifier: birdsnatureinnat02chic (find matches)
Title: Birds and nature in natural colors : being a scientific and popular treatise on four hundred birds of the United States and Canada
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors:
Subjects: Birds -- North America
Publisher: Chicago : A.W. Mumford, Publisher
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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of shell by the stone to mark its picnic-ground.) Family affairs bring little labor to a pair of hermits, for they have not farto go in search of nesting materials. They take what is close at hand, little drytwigs, lichens, and last years leaves crumbled and moist, which soon lose theirdampness and adhere together in a thick mass. But few have found it, this nest of the hermit, hidden under the busheswhere it is always shadowed, and where the fledglings may help themselves torambling insects without so much as stepping out of the door. They are supposedto take advantage of this nearness to food by remaining about the nest laterthan most birds; or if they run, returning on foot of course, having tardy useof their wings, but learning to stretch their legs instead. And well may theylearn to stretch their legs, as they will come to their fortunes by footing itmostly, when they are not migrating on the wing. Like the thrashers, the hermit must scratch for a living when berries are not 310
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HERMIT THRUSH,s Life-size ripe. By listening one may hear the bird at its work, and by slipping quietly inthe dusk of the early morning to the lowlands, or the thick woods, and standingstock-still for a while, even see it. But nearly always it is under cover on theedge of thickets, where the leafmold is unstirred and richest. And always byits own self is the hermit, as if it loves nature better than the company of itsfellows, listening now and then for underground or overhead sounds, and dwellingon the beauty of the leaf skeletons it overturns like a botanist. Lace-work and dainty insertion in delicate threads does Madam Hermitfind in her resorts—fabric so marvelous and fascinating she could admire itforever; cast-off finery of such insects as outgrow their clothes, grasshoppernymphs, and whole baskets full of locusts eggs hidden in half-decayed logs, andmaking a nourishing breakfast, rare done and delicious. She delights in thehaunts of the praying-mantis at egg-laying season, surp

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