“The red-backed shrike frequents groves, orchards, and gardens. It nests in thick hedges, sometimes in the interlacing branches of apple-trees. Its eggs are white tinged with red. The ring at the large end is composed of brown, gray, and greenish spots. In building its nest the bird uses a kind of everlasting that grows abundantly in the fields and has stems all covered with a white cotton-like fluff. The inside of the nest is furnished with a couch of little twigs and fine rootlets interwoven and comfortably overlaid with wool, down, and horsehair. The other shrikes use in their nests the same materials, especially the everlasting with its white fluff.” CHAPTER XXVII THE TITMOUSE “At last we come to some caterpillar-destroyers that are never anything but helpful. First of all there is the titmouse, also known as the tomtit. “It is a graceful little bird, lively and quick-tempered, always on the go, flying continually from tree to tree, carefully inspecting the branches, hanging from the tip ends of the slenderest of them in all sorts of positions, often head downward, swaying this way and that with its flexible support and never letting go its hold, while it examines all buds that it suspects of containing worms, and tears these buds to pieces in order to get at the grubs and insect eggs they contain. It is calculated that a titmouse consumes three hundred thousand insect eggs a year, and certainly few birds have larger families to provide for! Twenty or more little ones all huddled together in the same nest are not too great a strain on the parent’s energy and industry. The mother bird has to examine buds and the fissures in the bark of trees in order to find grubs, spiders, caterpillars, worms of every kind, and feed a score of beaks always open and demanding food in the bottom of the nest. She comes with a caterpillar, the brood is all excitement, twenty mouths fly open, but only one receives the morsel, leaving nineteen still expectant. Then away flies the titmouse again without an instant’s pause, to seek more food. Thus back and forth she flies, without rest and without weariness; and by the time the twentieth mouth is fed the first one is again open, and has been open a good while, clamoring for more. “I will leave you to guess how many worms are eaten in a day by such a household; and I will also let you reach your own conclusions regarding the value of these birds as caterpillar-hunters among our fruit-trees. Complaint is made, I know, that they tear open the buds and destroy them; but the harm they do is only apparent. When they pluck a bud it is to get out some tiny larva lodged between two scales, and not to harm the young leaves or flowers that are forming. It is better that this wormy bud should perish; it would not have produced anything, and the enemy lodged within it would have produced countless others to ravage the tree the next year.” “Then the titmouse does not feed on vegetable matter?” asked Louis.