“Yes, but you saw it yesterday and thought it was the blackbilled.”
“All right. Maybe some other girl has seen it, though, and reported on it first.”
“I don’t believe so. I got the black and white creeping warbler first while we were all at the rocks, you know, and I saw the least flycatcher first too,—two points for me on birds so far.”
“Somebody reported the tree swallow this morning before I had a chance to, but I found its nest in the knot of that apple tree near the club house. Come on and I’ll show you. Isn’t it pathetic that those poor kingbirds have to watch their nest so, or think they have to?”
“Where?”
“Didn’t you notice the kingbird’s nest on the very end of the tree next to the klondike opposite us? There is a white string hanging down from it. You’ll only have to look that way to see it. I suppose they never dreamed that all this crowd of girls would come, when they built the nest.”
“Most of the birds are so hard to see. The foliage is so thick, and then they are nesting, too, and that makes them shy.”
“Been on the hike?” asked Nora, as the girls reached the cabin. “I couldn’t wake up enough. It’s inhuman to expect anybody to get up before six o’clock.”
“It was fine. Better go the next time, Pat,” said Frances.
Later Lilian found that her little “zee, zoo” bird was a black-throated green warbler, and saw some baby ones in the bushes near the pine grove. Hilary soon had quite a list of warblers that nested about Merrymeeting. The gulls, chiefly the Herring Gull, came in numbers every day to be fed. A Laughing Gull was seen near Bath, and a Ring-Billed Gull near the boys’ island. On the Wiscasset trip much later, a fish hawk’s nest was seen on one of the piles common in the river. To the great amusement of the party one little city girl asked “How do the fishes get up there?”