Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/555

Rh at once, for it would then stay by its nest and strike angrily at an intruder. The reverse of such behavior was further seen when the egg of a "sitter" even after several days of incubation, was summarily removed.

The cedarbird, ordinarily so timid that it will promptly abandon its new made nest if disturbed in the slightest degree, in the course of a few days becomes so "bold" as to submit to any change which the experimenter chooses to make. I have known this bird to stand on its displaced nesting bough, which had been sawn from a tree and mounted on stakes in a field for close-at-hand study, to permit the writer and a companion to approach within three feet and inspect bird and nest at leisure, while the adult assumed that curious bold upright attitude, with beak pointed to the zenith, in which nature seems to transform the actor into a part of the tree itself.

In my work on "The Home Life of Wild Birds" numerous illustrations of the action of this remarkable instinct are given. In one case a flicker, before so wary, for a few days after the young were born, would permit of any liberties, even to the sawing of a large window in the side of her nesting tree, without budging a feather, not even to shake the sawdust from her back, and allowing herself to be enclosed in the hand. In the Bahama Islands I have taken both the yellow-billed