Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/283



HERE is no better type or epitome of wild nature than the bird's nest—something built, and yet as if it grew, a part of the ground or of the rock or of the branch upon which it is placed; beginning so coarsely, so irregularly, and ending so finely and symmetrically; so unlike the work of hands, and yet the result of a skill beyond hands; and when it holds its complement of eggs, how pleasing, how suggestive!

The bird adapts means to an end, and yet so differently from the way of man—an end of which it does not know the value or the purpose. We know it is prompted to it by the instinct of reproduction. When the woodpecker in the fall excavates a lodge in a dry limb, we know he is prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation, but the birds themselves obey the behests of nature without knowledge.

A bird's nest suggests design, and yet it seems almost haphazard; the result of a kind of madness, yet with method in it. The hole the woodpecker drills for its cell is to the eye a perfect circle, and the rim of most nests is as true as that of a cup. The circle and the sphere exist in nature; they are mother forms and hold all other forms. They are easily attained; they are spontaneous and inevitable. The bird models her nest about her own breast; she turns round and round in it, and its circular character results as a matter of course. Angles, right lines, measured precision, so characteristic of the works of man, are rarely met with in organic nature.

Nature reaches her ends by devious ways; she loiters, she meanders, she plays by the way; she surely "arrives," but it is always in a blind, hesitating, experimental kind of way. Follow the tunnels of the ants or the crickets, or of the moles and the weasels, underground, or the courses of the streams, or the paths of the animals, above ground—how they turn and hesitate, how wayward and un- decided they are! A right line seems out of the question.

The oriole often weaves strings into her nest; sometimes she binds and overhands the part of the rim where she alights in going in, to make it stronger, but it is always done in a hit-and-miss, childish sort of way, as one would expect it to be; the strings are massed or snarled, or dangling at loose ends, or caught around branches; the weaving and the sewing are effective, and the whole nest is a marvel of blind skill, of untaught intelligence; yet how unmethodical, how delightfully irregular, how unmistakably a piece of wild nature!

Sometimes the egg of the bird gets ripe before the nest is ready, the instinct of the bird is tardy; in such a case the egg is of course lost. I once found the nest of the black and white creeping warbler in a mossy bank in the woods, beneath which was an egg of the bird. The warbler had excavated the site for her nest, dropped her egg into it, and then gone on with her building. Instinct is not always inerrant. Nature is wasteful, and plays the game with a free hand. Yet what she loses on one side she gains on the other; she is like that least bittern Mr. Frank Chapman tells about: Two of the bittern's five eggs had been punctured by the long-billed marsh-wren. When the bird returned to her nest and found the two eggs punctured, she made no outcry, showed no emotion, but deliberately proceeded to eat them. Having done this, she dropped the empty shells over the side of the nest, together with any straws that had become soiled in the process, cleaned her bill, then proceeded with her incubation. This was nature in a nutshell—or rather, egg-shell,—turning her mishaps to some good account. If the egg will not make a bird, it will make food; if not food, then fertilizer.

Among nearly all our birds, the female