The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 19

III. THE MOUND-BUILDERS

Another cla.s.s of birds that have a fancy for big dome-like nests are the mound-birds. We find them in Australia, the Philippines, and the islands of the South Seas. Their scientific nickname is _Megapoddidae_, the "big-footed." It's with their big feet that they pile immense heaps of leaves, twigs, and rotten wood over their eggs.

And what for, do you suppose?

To hatch them! This heap of material not only absorbs the heat of the sun, but, in decaying, makes heat of its own. These mounds, of course, contribute tons and tons of fertilizer to the soil, but what interests the birds is that these warm heaps hatch their eggs. It's a kind of an incubator system, you see. As it is with many tens of thousands of our own little chickens, these days, the baby megapodes are born orphans.

That heap of dead sticks, leaves, and earth is all the mother they ever know. As soon as the mother birds have laid their eggs in the mounds and covered them up, they go off gossiping with other lady megapodes, and don't bother their heads any more about their babies.

WHY LITTLE BIG FOOT NEVER SAYS "MAMMA"

But it really doesn't seem to matter. It's more of a question of sentiment than anything else, for the babies get on very well by themselves. When the time comes they not only make their own way out of the sh.e.l.l, as all birds do, but they work their way up through the rubbish-heap and run off at once into the woods to hunt something to eat.

It's all right, after all, I suppose; but if _I_ were a little mound-builder's baby, I'd rather have a mamma that would stay around and go places with me, wouldn't you?

There's one nice thing about these mamma mound-builders, though; they're so neighborly and sociable. It's like a regular old-fashioned quilting party to see them build a nest. The birds look like turkeys, and one of the species is called the "brush turkey," but they are no bigger than an ordinary chicken--than a rather small chicken, in fact. When I tell you, then, that these mounds of theirs are often six feet high and twelve feet across in the widest part, the middle, you can see it takes good team-work to put them up.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRUSH TURKEYS BUILDING THEIR INCUBATORS

It's like an old-fashioned quilting party--the co-operative mound building of the brush turkeys. The text tells you about that back kick of theirs.]

So a lot of the lady mound-builders get together in woodsy places, where there's plenty of leaves and twigs lying around and together build a mound. One will run forward a little way, rake up and grasp a handful of sticks and leaves--I mean to say a footful--and kick it backward. The motion is much like that of an old hen scratching. Then another bird gathers a footful; then another, and soon they are all throwing the rubbish toward the same pile; all as busy as a sewing-circle, but--curiously enough--n.o.body saying a word! Before the mounds are quite done, they all begin laying their eggs in them; as many as forty or fifty, before they are through.

Some species frequent scrubby jungles along the sea. These scratch a slanting hole in the sandy soil about three feet deep and lay their eggs on the bottom, loosely covering up the mouth of the hole with a collection of sticks, sh.e.l.ls, and seaweed. The natives say these birds, before they leave, go carefully over the footprints leading to this treasure-house, scratch them out and make tracks leading in various directions away from the nest. And all species lay their eggs at night.

You see why, don't you? They're just that cautious.

SUCH AN EGG FROM SUCH A BIRD

But if you should find one of their nests full of brick-red eggs you'd never guess who laid them, they're so big! Away back in 1673, an English missionary to China who had stopped off at the Philippines, on his way, wrote a little book when he got back home about where he had been and what he had seen, and he just couldn't get over the wonder of the mound-builders. Among other things he says, in one place in his book:

"There is a very singular bird called Tabon. What I and very many more admired[23] is that being in body no bigger than an ordinary chicken, it lays an egg larger than a goose's."

[23] "Admire," in those days, meant "to wonder at."

"So," he adds, "the egg is bigger than the bird itself!"

IV. THE SWALLOWS

To make the acquaintance of either the mound-builders or those dear little oven-birds--_aren't_ they dear?--we must be travellers, of course, for with their short wings neither the mound-builders nor the oven-birds ever could come all the way up here to see us. But another feathered farmer--and, like the oven-bird, a clay-worker and most neighborly--everybody knows; the swallow. Like Kim, the swallow is the little friend of all the world.

Swallows of one kind and another are found everywhere--almost everywhere that people can live; usually where people _do_ live. And if all the soil they've helped pulverize and mix--even since the days when the swallows built under the eaves and rafters of the ark--was spread out, it would easily make another Egypt, I do believe!

But, speaking of the way swallows take to human society, do you know where our barn-swallows came from? They were originally cliff-dwellers away out West. The early explorers found enormous collections of their nests plastered all over the perpendicular cliffs and along the bluffs.

Just as soon, however, as the country settled up and men put up barns these little cliff-dwellers, deserting rocks and bluffs, began building their bottle-shaped nests under the eaves. The swallows live on insects--including squash-bugs, stink-bugs, shield-bugs, and jumping plant-lice; and that's supposed to be one of the reasons for the curious fact that they left their ancient family seats--they found so many more insects about the barns and the farmer's fields and the gardens and the orchards.

TINY SOIL MILLS OF THE BABY SWALLOW

Haven't you often watched them and listened to them, diving and chattering around the barn in their busy season; that is to say, in the spring and summer time? Then the air is full of insects and is fairly woven with their darting wings. Some keep busy picking up the insects that are always hovering about in a barnyard, while others dash away to some near-by marsh or to the meadow or to the creek. Over the grain-fields they go, over the meadows and back again straight to the nest where downy babies are cheeping for them. The parents feed them, stop and chatter a moment, and then off they go. Follow that one down to the marsh. See how she flies high, round and round in circles, and then swoops for an insect. She missed him! Then she wheels, darts up--darts down--to right--to left. There, she's got him! Then off like an arrow to the nest. The soft-bodied insects are chosen and chewed up for the babies, while the parents eat the tougher ones. And to help digestion they give the babies little bits of gravel, although they don't use it themselves. So, in grinding up this gravel the baby birds help make soil before they are old enough to do any nest-building.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SAND MARTIN AND HIS HOME IN THE BANK]

You've noticed, of course, that all the swallows about a barn don't build under the eaves. Some build under the rafters inside the barn.

That isn't just a matter of taste; it's family tradition. The eave-builders are descendants of the cliff-swallows, while the birds known to bird students as "barn" swallows build under the rafters.

But they don't take to the fine, new modern barns--all spick and span--the barn-swallows don't. If there's an old gray barn with doors that never shut quite snug, a board off here and there, and several panes in the cob-webbed windows broken out----

"Oh, just the thing!" say Mr. and Mrs. Swallow, and they turn their backs on the new barn and proceed to build their cute little nests of clay among the rafters of that old tumbled-down affair. In their preference for the old gray barns, the swallows are like the artists, the painters that Mr. Dooley told about. He was talking about artists to his friend, Mr. Hennessey:

"I don't mane the kind of painther that paints yer fine new barn," said Mr. Dooley. "I mane the kind of painther that makes a pitcher of yer _old_ barn and wants to charge ye more'n the barn itself is worth."

WHY ARTISTS AND SWALLOWS PREFER OLD BARNS

The reason the artists prefer old barns is that they look better in pictures, but the reason the barn-swallow shows the same taste is that, with windows that have panes in them and doors that shut tight you'd no sooner start to build a nest than, coming back with a pellet of clay, or bringing a feather for the little feather-bed, you'd be liable to find the door shut and you could no more get in until ch.o.r.e time than you could open the time-lock in the First National Bank. And suppose there were babies and you'd just _got_ to get back--you see it wouldn't do at all!

But both the barn-swallows and the old gray barns will be seen only in pictures before long, if things keep on; what with these new barns and the cats always trying to catch the few swallows there are left--when you're swooping low to catch a squash-bug, say--and those hateful sparrows that tear your nest to pieces. And for several years swallows were killed by thousands to make ornaments for women's hats until this shameful business was stopped by law!

On the Pacific Coast, if you're out there even as early as March, you'll see a purplish-bronze swallow, with bronze-green markings. These swallows make a specialty of orchard insects and that's why, perhaps, they build under the eaves of the farmhouse rather than the barn. But, like the rest of the swallow family, they think nothing quite so nice as a bed of feathers to raise babies in, and they know as well as the cliff-swallows and the barn-swallow that a barnyard is a great place for feathers.

And besides, there's a man out there, in one place, that keeps a supply of feathers just to give away when the swallows are nesting. Watch him, over on the hillside. He takes a little bunch of feathers and throws them up into the air from his open hand. A swallow skims by and catches one of these feathers before it touches the ground. But soon the word pa.s.ses along:

"Here's that nice man with the feathers!"

And, pretty soon, there are a half-dozen in the game. They flit closer and closer to that generous hand, seizing the feathers almost the moment they are in the air. Then one, bolder than the rest, s.n.a.t.c.hes a feather right from the man's thumb and finger. The little rogue!

By the way, do you know who that man is? It's Mr. W. L. Finley, State Ornithologist of Oregon. "Our little brothers of the air," as Olive Thorne Miller calls the birds, are getting to be so much appreciated, not only as the friends of man, but for their beauty and the usefulness of their lives, that both our State and national governments have laws to protect them, and such men as Mr. Finley are employed to look after their interests.

Of course, he doesn't _have_ to furnish feather-beds for the baby swallows--he just does!

[Ill.u.s.tration: OFF FOR THE SOUTH]

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

If you want to get better acquainted with ostriches you should read Olive Thorne Miller's "African Nine Feet High," in "Little Folks in Feathers and Fur." Carpenter deals with the ostrich in his "How the World is Clothed" and in his "Geographic Reader on Africa"; Johonnott's "Neighbors with Wings and Fins" gives a chapter to "Giants of Desert and Plain," among which you may be sure he includes the ostrich.

Allen, in writing about "Some Strange Nurseries" ("Nature's Work Shop"), tells why it is Papa Ostrich has most to do with the hatching of the eggs when the sun is not on the job.

Lucas, in his "Animals of the Past," speaks of ostriches and crocodiles as the nearest living relatives of--guess what--the dinosaurs! (Yet look at the dinosaur in "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble" and see if you can't make out a good deal of the ostrich and the crocodile in him.)

But, speaking of Papa Ostrich's parental duties, did you know that it's _Mr._ Puffin, and not _Mrs._ Puffin, who digs the family burrow? Arabella Buckley's "Morals of Science" tells that and many other interesting things about devoted husbands among the birds, including how Papa Nightingale feeds Mamma Nightingale.

In the "Children's Hour," Volume 7, page 310, you will find an interesting article about the puffins of Iceland.

"The Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts" tells about one of the feathered clay-workers, the nuthatch of Syria, and why he makes his nest look like a rock. These nuthatches love to build so well that they often make nests that they never use; and they even help put up nests for their neighbors!