With tail above his back, he sails Along the angles of the rails, Content to gain two rods in three, And have sure highway from his tree. Dear is the old-time squirrel way, With mosses green and lichens gray,-- The straggling fence, that girds the hill, And wanders through the pine woods still. I loved it in my boyhood time, I loved it in my manhood's prime, Would in the corn-field I could lie, And watch the squirrels zigzag by! --JAMES BUCKHAM. [Illustration: From col. Chi. Acad. Sciences. CHICAGO COLORTYPE CO., CHIC. & NEW YORK WILSON'S TERN. 1/2 Life-size. Copyright by Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898. Chicago.] THE COMMON TERN. According to Colonel Goss, these birds are abundant on the Atlantic coast, decreasing in numbers west, and are rare and exceptional on the Pacific coast. They are migratory, arriving from the middle of April to the first of May, returning as early as the first of September. Their habitat is chiefly eastern temperate North America and various parts of the eastern hemisphere, breeding irregularly throughout the range. The nests have been found from the south coast of Florida to the Arctic circle, on the lakes in Wisconsin, and in large numbers in several of the Magdalen Isles, Gulf of St. Lawrence. Writers disagree as to the composition of their nests, some maintaining that they are made of seaweeds and grasses, others that they are without material of any kind, the eggs lying upon the bare ground in a slight depression in the sand. The eggs are three or four, of a pale blueish or greenish drab, thickly and rather evenly spotted and blotched with varying shades of light and dark brown, with shell markings of pale lilac, ovate in form.