A Well-Worn Nest
A pair of blackbirds in my neighbourhood are now bringing up a third brood in the same nest. How rare it is for the same nest to be used ! I have known a pair of swallows—in the same village as the blackbirds' nest—bring up four broods within one season, all in the same nest ; but it was both cleaned and repaired in fact by human hands. Many other examples could be quoted, but when all is said it remains that our garden birds very rarely lay even a second clutch in the same nest in which a family has been already brought up, though a queer exception was observed last year in an Oxford garden, where a robin (which, incidentally, had been helped by human hands in the original building of the nest) tore out the old lining, completely refurbished the nest and then, and not till then, laid the second clutch.
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