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—nobody 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, shells, 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."
"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!