U NLUC KY BLACKBIRDS
A pair of blackbirds have just come to grief here , for the third time in their efforts to raise a family. The trees they frequent are pollarded, over-pruned and hardly safe, either from exploring cats or in- quisitive boys. The pair began to build as soon as the buds were on the chosen tree. They advertised their work and the first egg was hardly hatched before the nest was wrecked. They moved to a tree a little farther on and they might have managed it this time had a pair of magpies left them alone. They finally moved thirty yards to make a third nest. The boys found no novelty in a blackbird's nest so late in the season. The magpies missed them, but although young blackbirds are at first fairly quiet in the nest they begin to clamour for food as days pass and a cat knows the meaning of this sound. When I passed this morning the nesting blackbirds were missing. On the ground beneath the tree lay the remants of the cat's feast, part of the working-out of the law of averages,
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