Page:Scouting for girls, adapted from Girl guiding.djvu/118

104 kinds of birds by their cry, by their appearance, and by their way of flying. She will also get to know where their nests are to be found, what sort of nests they are, what are the colors of the eggs and so on. And also how the young appear. Some of them come out fluffy, others covered with feathers, others with very little on at all. The young pigeon, for instance, has not feathers at all, whereas a young moorhen can swim about as soon as it comes out of the egg; while chickens run about and hunt flies within a few minutes; and yet a sparrow is quite useless for some days and is blind, and has to be fed and coddled by his parents.

Then it is an interesting sight to see the old birds training their young ones to fly by getting up above them and flapping their wings a few times until all the young ones imitate them. Then they hop from one twig to another, still flapping their wings, and the young ones follow suit and begin to find that their wings help them to balance; and finally they jump from one branch to another for some distance so that the wings support them in their effort. The young ones very soon find that they are able to use their wings for flying, but it is all done by degrees and by careful instruction.

If you think there is no natural history or observation of bird life possible in the city, get hold of that delightful book "Lives of the Hunted," by Ernest Seton Thompson. There you will find a ripping story of Randy and Biddy, the two sparrows, who built a nest between them after wonderful differences of opinion. Randy started to make it of sticks, and Biddy almost declined to live with him in