After considerable
effort I succeeded in breaking the stub off near
the ground, and brought it down into the boat.
``Just the thing,'' I said; ``surely the bluebirds
will prefer this to an artificial box.'' But, lo and
behold, it already had bluebirds in it! We had not
heard a sound or seen a feather till the trunk was
in our hands, when, on peering into the cavity, we
discovered two young bluebirds about half grown.
This was a predicament indeed!
Well, the only thing we could do was to stand
the tree-trunk up again as well as we could, and
as near as we could to where it had stood before.
This was no easy thing. But after a time we had
it fairly well replaced, one end standing in the
mud of the shallow water and the other resting
against a tree. This left the hole to the nest about
ten feet below and to one side of its former position.
Just then we heard the voice of one of the
parent birds, and we quickly paddled to the other
side of the stream, fifty feet away, to watch her
proceedings, saying to each other, ``Too bad! too
bad!'' The mother bird had a large beetle in her
beak. She alighted upon a limb a few feet above
the former site of her nest, looked down upon us,
uttered a note or two, and then dropped down
confidently to the point in the vacant air where
the entrance to her nest had been but a few
moments before.
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