As I was about leaving the woods, my hat almost brushed the nest of the red-eyed vireo, which hung basket-like on the end of a low, drooping branch of the beech.  I should never have seen it had the bird kept her place.  It contained three eggs of the bird’s own, and one of the cow bunting.  The strange egg was only just perceptibly larger than the others, yet, in three days after, when I looked into the nest again and found all but one egg hatched, the young interloper was at least four times as large as either of the others, and with such a superabundance of bowels as to almost smother his bedfellows beneath them.  That the intruder should fare the same as the rightful occupants, and thrive with them, was more than ordinary potluck; but that it alone should thrive, devouring, as it were, all the rest, is one of those freaks of Nature in which she would seem to discourage the homely virtues of prudence and honesty.  Weeds and parasites have the odds greatly against them, yet they wage a very successful war nonetheless.

The woods hold not such another gem as the nest of the hummingbird.  The finding of one is an event to date from.  It is the next best thing to finding an eagle’s nest.  I have met with but two, both by chance.  One was placed on the horizontal branch of a chestnut-tree, with a solitary green leaf, forming a complete canopy, about an inch and a half above it.  The repeated spiteful dartings of the bird past my ears, as I stood under the tree, caused me to suspect that I was intruding upon some one’s privacy; and, following it with my eye, I soon saw the nest, which was in process of construction.  Adopting my usual tactics of secreting myself near by, I had the satisfaction of seeing the tiny artist at work.  It was the female, unassisted by her mate.  At intervals of two or three minutes she would appear with a small tuft of some cottony substance in her beak, and alighting quickly in the nest, arrange the material she had brought, using her breast as a model.

The other nest I discovered in a dense forest on the side of a mountain.  The sitting bird was disturbed as I passed beneath her.  The whirring of her wings arrested my attention, when, after a short pause, I had the good luck to see, through an opening in the leaves, the bird return to her nest, which appeared like a mere wart or excrescence an a small branch.  The hummingbird, unlike all others, does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it.  She enters it as quick as a flash, but as light as any feather.  Two eggs are the complement.  They are perfectly white, and so frail that only a woman’s fingers may touch them.  Incubation lasts about ten days.  In a week, the young have flown.

The only nest like the hummingbirds, and comparable to it in neatness and symmetry, is that of the blue-gray gnatcatcher.  This is often saddled upon the limb in the same manner, though it is generally more or less pendent; it is deep and soft, composed mostly of some vegetable down, covered all over with delicate tree-lichens, and, except that it is much larger, appears almost identical with the nest of the hummingbird.