In 1917 we had twenty-one pet robins, and I have often seen little Jasper start for school and have to come back and feed his pets to keep them from following him away.

The way we get them is when some neighbor gets afraid his cats are going to kill the young robins around his place, we get them. If you want to try it, keep them warm, in a small dry-goods box. When you have had them about six hours, open their mouths and slip a little custard in them. The second day they will open their own mouths and in about three days they will accept you as their stepmother and you can let them out. Be sure and keep them good and warm, and feed often.

We put tags on some of our robins, and odd ones returned the next spring, and they are always more wild; in fact when they return they will not let you near them. This fact I do not understand. My last experiment was to take two robins out of a nest of four where the parent birds were the tamest of any I knew; then I went and got one out of a nest of two, with exceptionally wild parents. The birds were all taken the same hour. But the two were tamer in two days than the one was in four.

SNOWBALL

This reproduction of a photograph will introduce to you Miss Snowball, our pure white robin with pink eyes and cream-colored beak and feet. Snowball was hatched in a nest with three others, but, like the parents, the other three were just common robins.

CHAPTER XI.
The Bluebirds.

To the average middle-aged person of America, this bird needs little or no introduction, but to the young people they are now quite rare. In fact I was speaking to a young lady quite recently, and she has camped out every summer for the longer part of her life (but of course, like all other girls at her age, she has just passed sixteen; passed it coming back, of course) and she told me she had never seen a bluebird. They have decreased over ninety-five per cent. the last forty years, but when I was a boy they were as common as the robin is to-day. They usually arrive the same day in the spring, bringing with them their beautiful note that no musician has ever been able to imitate correctly.

In 1908 I put up three or four nests for them and in 1909 a pair came and built in one. These nests were made of wood; so it occurred to me possibly they would build in tile houses, and I set to work and made six or eight different varieties of drain-tile, and to my surprise and delight the wrens and bluebirds both took to the tile houses and have never built in the frame one since. Last summer I put a wren house up on Monday and the very next morning Mrs. Wren had her nest half built; or in other words, the tile house had hardly gotten cold before she started carrying in sticks.

I had one pair of bluebirds raise their first family for three successive years in the same house. So last summer I made about two hundred bluebird houses, taking this, their choice house, as a pattern. This pair of birds I know raised three families one summer, but they usually raise two. The same house does for both wrens and bluebirds; if the wrens use it, they will stop the large hole up with sticks so the English sparrows cannot get in, but of course leaving door-room enough to get in themselves, as they are so much smaller. This is my experience, but whether these birds will take to tile houses away from here, where they are not accustomed to seeing red tile and a red man, remains to be proven.