CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
I called this chapter when I first wrote it “The Friendship of Nature”—a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the thought and the lesson in the story here. This was first written about six years ago, and to-day, May 12, 1912, that pair of phœbes, or another pair, have their nest out under the pig-pen roof as they have had every year since I have known the pen. Repeat and expand the thought as I have put it into the mouth of Nature in the first paragraph—“We will share them [the acres] together.” Instill into your pupils’ minds the large meaning of obedience to Nature’s laws and love for her and all her own. Show them also how ready Nature is (and all the birds and animals and flowers) to be friendly; and how even a city dooryard may hold enough live wild things for a small zoo. This chapter might well be made use of by the city teacher to stir her pupils to see what interesting live things their city or neighborhood has, although the woods and open fields are miles away.
FOR THE PUPIL
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a hornet’s nest: the white-faced hornet, that builds the great cone-shaped paper nests.
swifts thunder in the chimney: See chapter VII (and notes) in “Winter.” For the “thunder” see section IX in chapter X of this book.
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cabbage butterfly: a pest; a small whitish butterfly with a few small black spots. Its grubs eat cabbage.
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the crested flycatcher: is the largest of the family; builds in holes; distinguished by its use of cast-off snake-skins in its nests.
kingbird: Everybody knows him, for it is usually he who chases the marauding crows; he builds, out in the apple tree if he can, a big, bulky nest with strings a-flying from it: also called “bee-martin,” a most useful bird.
wood pewee: builds on the limbs of forest trees a most beautiful nest, much like a hummingbird’s, only larger. Pewee’s soft, pensive call of “pe-e-e-wee” in the deep, quiet, dark-shrouded summer woods is one of the sweetest of bird notes.
chebec: a little smaller than a sparrow; builds a beautiful nest in orchard trees and says “chebec, chebec, chebec.”
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One had died: After phœbe brings off her first brood sprinkle a little, tobacco-dust or lice-powder, such as you use in the hen-yard, into the nest to kill the vermin. Otherwise the second and third broods may be eaten alive by lice or mites.