The red cedar is another tree we must have, as it affords shelter as well as food, the berries, like the wild grapes, hanging all winter.
Where the climate will permit, by all means plant some mountain ash. The big, crimson clusters of fruit hanging on the mountain ash trees in northern Ontario are more beautiful to me than the great Woolworth, or the General Motors office building of Detroit; and what they look like to the hundreds of birds that feed on them during the fall and winter months can only be imagined when we are returning from a moose-hunt, late at night, cold, tired, and hungry.
But the two outstanding ones, to me, are mulberries and wild grapes, the berries for summer, and the grapes for the winter.
8. How can I get the birds to come to my window in the winter?
Make two movable self-servers and nail each to a top of a barrel. Feed cracked nuts, a little suet, etc.
Set your feed-racks a rod or two apart, back among your shrubbery. As soon as you have a nice bunch of birds coming keep moving your racks toward your house; this can be done by just moving the farther one around in front of the other, each time.
9. How long does it take our common birds to hatch and fly from the nest?
Robins set from thirteen to fourteen days, and fly in about two weeks. But wild birds are not like our domestic fowls. If the latter leaves the nest, or stays off one night, that brood is about sure to all die. But if a robin is disturbed, such as staying off the nest for six or eight hours at a time, the young are very apt to hatch. I have known cases of this kind when the eggs didn’t hatch until the fifteenth day.
I once set a hen on nine wild duck eggs. She started out fine, and set steadily for two weeks. Then she changed her mind, so I changed hens; but number two was no better. I then took the eggs and put them under hen number three, who finished the job on the thirty-second day, when seven out of the nine hatched, but they were very weak. Yet I managed to raise five of them to mature ducks. Duck eggs should hatch in twenty-eight days.
Barn swallows fly in about thirty-five days from the time the first eggs are laid; yet it must be remembered that young swallows must be able to float in the air before they leave the nest.