Day after day, as I go to a certain piece of woods, I observe a male indigo-bird sitting on precisely the same part of a high branch, and singing in his most vivacious style.  As I approach he ceases to sing, and, flirting his tail right and left with marked emphasis, chirps sharply.  In a low bush near by, I come upon the object of his solicitude,—­a thick compact nest composed largely of dry leaves and fine grass, in which a plain brown bird is sitting upon four pale blue eggs.

The wonder is that a bird will leave the apparent security of the treetops to place its nest in the way of the many dangers that walk and crawl upon the ground.  There, far up out of reach, sings the bird; here, not three feet from the ground, are its eggs or helpless young.  The truth is, birds are the greatest enemies of birds, and it is with reference to this fact that many of the smaller species build.

Perhaps the greatest proportion of birds breed along highways.  I have known the ruffed grouse to come out of a dense wood and make its nest at the root of a tree within ten paces of the road, where, no doubt, hawks and crows, as well as skunks and foxes, would be less likely to find it out.  Traversing remote mountain-roads through dense woods, I have repeatedly seen the veery, or Wilson’s thrush, sitting upon her nest, so near me that I could almost take her from it by stretching out my hand.  Birds of prey show none of this confidence in man, and, when locating their nests, avoid rather than seek his haunts.

In a certain locality in the interior of New York, I know, every season, where I am sure to find a nest or two of the slate-colored snowbird.  It is under the brink of a low mossy bank, so near the highway that it could be reached from a passing vehicle with a whip.  Every horse or wagon or foot passenger disturbs the sitting bird.  She awaits the near approach of the sound of feet or wheels, and then darts quickly across the road, barely clearing the ground, and disappears amid the bushes on the opposite side.

In the trees that line one of the main streets and fashionable drives leading our of Washington city and less than half a mile from the boundary, I have counted the nests of five different species at one time, and that without any very close scrutiny of the foliage, while, in many acres of woodland half a mile off, I searched in vain for a single nest.  Among the five, the nest that interested me most was that of the blue grosbeak.  Here this bird, which according to Audubon’s observations in Louisiana, is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand.  The nest was composed mainly of fragments of newspaper and stalks of grass, and, though so low,