Page:How to Have Bird Neighbors.pdf/102

 sibilant or smacking twitter, a trill, and a whistle. To me it sounds something like this:

tr-r-r-r      hee "Hee               /        \     /   \ ho-ho-ho." \             /          \   /     chut-chut-chut            ho

They keep this up in a sort of conversational fashion, and as they do so are continually changing places on the housetop, the porches, or the wires.

In June the baby martins began to lounge on the porches and to sun themselves on the wires. After a while there were more babies. The porches were covered with them. My! how busy those parents were! As babies increased in numbers, evidently the parents felt that the older ones ought to become self-supporting; but they preferred to spend their days preening and twittering and being waited on. The parents pecked and scolded them, and finally pushed them off their perches to make them go and hunt food for themselves.

One day after the second batch of babies had appeared outside, two hawks came and perched on the telephone wires near the martin home. My attention was attracted to them by the guttural calls or scoldings of the martins. As they called, they flew swiftly to and from the house, and around in big circles. Soon the wires were lined with martins that had come from other colonies, and the air was rent with their guttural shriekings. Evidently they felt that these