Oh, that glorious Wisconsin
wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring
when Nature's pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping
time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the
winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly
rejoicing together!
Next morning, when we climbed to the precious jay nest to take another
admiring look at the eggs, we found it empty. Not a shell-fragment was
left, and we wondered how in the world the birds were able to carry
off their thin-shelled eggs either in their bills or in their feet
without breaking them, and how they could be kept warm while a new
nest was being built. Well, I am still asking these questions. When I
was on the Harriman Expedition I asked Robert Ridgway, the eminent
ornithologist, how these sudden flittings were accomplished, and he
frankly confessed that he didn't know, but guessed that jays and many
other birds carried their eggs in their mouths; and when I objected
that a jay's mouth seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that
birds' mouths were larger than the narrowness of their bills
indicated.
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