The architecture of birds / [Anon].

  • Rennie, James, 1787-1867.
Date:
[1831]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The architecture of birds / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cephalus,*) which is so little afraid of man, that it not unfrequently breeds in the trees growing in the streets of the American cities. Wilson found several of these nests within the boundaries of the city of Philadelphia: two in the button-wood (Platanus occidentalis), and one in the decayed limb of an elm. ‘ The old ones,’ he says, ‘1 observe, make their excursions regularly to the woods beyond the Schuylkill, about a mile dis- tant; preserving great silence and circumspection in visiting their nests; precautions not much attended to by them in the depth of the woods, because there the prying eye of man is less to be dreaded. But not- withstanding the care which this bird, in common with the rest of its genus, takes to place its young beyond the reach of enemies, within the hollows of trees, yet there is one: deadly foe, against whose depredations neither the height of the tree, nor the depth of eo cavity, is the least security. This is the black snake (Coluber constrictor), who frequently glides up the trunk of the tree, and, like a skulking savage, enters the woodpecker’s peaceful apartment, devours the eggs or helpless young, in spite of the cries and flutterings of the parents ; and, if the place be large enough, coils himself up in the spot they occupied, where .he will sometimes remain for several days. ‘The eager schoolboy, after hazarding his neck to reach the woodpecker’s hole, at the triumphant moment when he thinks the nestlings his own, and strips his arm, launching it down into the cavity, and grasping what he conceives to be the callow young, starts with horror at the site of a hideous snake, and almost drops from his giddy pinnacle, retreating down the tree with terror and precipitation. Several adventures of this kind have come to my knowledge ; and one * Wilson, Amer. Ornith.-i, 145 — 7.