Then you may see the woodpecker hammering with his chisel-like bill, making a home in some dead tree.  You can hear his strokes a long way through the woods.  The chips fly from beneath his strong blows.

The robin, the phoebe, and the barn and eave swallows are masons.  The robin moulds an inner layer of mud in his round nest and covers it with fine grasses.  The phoebe uses a mixture of mud and moss in plastering his large nest on some beam or rafter.

The barn swallow also uses a beam.  His nest is nearly all mud, but is lined with soft feathers.  The eave swallows are the most expert masons of all.  They build rows of mud tenements beneath the eaves of the barn.  Each little apartment is rounded over and has a round hole for a door.

The chimney swift or swallow uses wood and glue in making the pretty little bracket-like basket he fastens to the chimney wall.  His feet are so small that he cannot perch as other birds do, so when he rests he clings to the side of the chimney and leans on his tail.  Each tail feather is tipped with a stiff, sharp point that keeps it from slipping.

How then do you suppose he gathers the twigs for his nest?  Watch him some day when he is flying rapidly about.  You may see that he goes by a dead tree, and as he passes he hovers for a second near the end of a limb.  Then it is that he snaps off with his bill a small, dry twig for his home.

But how can he fasten a nest of twigs to the upright chimney wall?  Well, the chimney swift carries a gluepot with him.  It is in his mouth, where certain glands produce a sticky substance like mucilage.  With this he glues the little twigs together and fastens them to the bricks.

Sometimes a heavy rain will moisten this glue.  Then the nest is loosened from the chimney and, with the poor little birds in it, falls to the fireplace.  If you fasten it as high in the chimney above the fireplace as you can, the parent birds may come down and feed their young.

The humming-bird is an upholsterer and decorator.  He and his tiny wife build the daintiest little nest it is possible to imagine.  They use plant-down or “thistle-down” and cover it all over with grayish or greenish lichens, those flakes of “moss” we see growing on the bark of trees.  Generally they place it on a limb of a large tree.  There it looks so much like a knot that it takes sharp eyes to find a humming-bird’s nest.

The great crested flycatcher places his nest in a hollow limb and though he seems to care very little about its appearance he has, nevertheless, an idea of his own about decoration and evidently thinks no nest is complete without a bit of cast-off snake skin.

Just why he should want to have such a thing in his home no one can say.  Some naturalists believe that he uses it as a scarecrow to frighten his enemies away.  But I do not think he could give a reason if he were asked.

Birds build the same kind of nests their parents built, without asking the reason why.