No, they cannot count, and they do not know one from another. If you watch a bird at a nest, it gives the food to the nearest mouth: it never picks and chooses. But young birds know when they have had enough--for the present. If you are feeding a young bird you have taken from the nest, how ferociously it takes the first bit, and the second, and perhaps the third; and then how utterly and suddenly its appetite collapses! It refuses, in the most dogged and sulky way, to open its beak though you tempt it ever so much. It has had enough, and it knows it, and isn't going to burst for you or for anybody else. It is just the same in the nest. The first two or three pieces of food may all follow one another down the same throat, but next time the mother comes there is one mouth shut tight. And so it goes on. One by one the mouths are shut up, and the mother comes at last with a titbit, and finds every one of the little ones asleep, on full stomachs, and as haughtily regardless of her and her provender as if they would never need feeding any more. So the mother eats it herself, and sits down on the top of the sleepers. This is the whole secret of the mystery. While the little birds are hungry they keep on asking for more: as soon as they are stuffed full they convey that information to the parents by holding their tongues. So all get fed. And a word here as to that odd superstition which is still current, that the British Museum will give "a hundred pounds for a complete kingfisher's nest." Every year the "authorities" are written to by people in the country offering to send them one at the price, but of course it was never offered, and indeed a kingfisher's nest has not been wanted, since the beautiful section of a river-bank, with the nest, and young, and old ones all complete, was set up in the Bird Gallery at the British Museum in 1883. But the kingfisher's nest is not the only article that a deluded public seems to imagine the British Museum is still pining for, for as a letter to the _Times_ by Sir J. Flower in 1894 tells us, offers are regularly received of tortoise-shell tom-cats at the most exorbitant prices, and inquiries continue to come in, asking if it is true that the Museum has offered a hundred pounds for "an entire cigar-ash." Nowhere can the lover of Nature find more to spend his time over than in the pretty haunts of this pretty bird. As a schoolboy I have spent many hours in water-meadows watching the bird-life about me, and, sitting on some mossy stump in the middle of the marsh-marigolds or on some rail that straddled across the water, enjoyed the little spectacles, comic and serious, that various companies of amateurs--moor-hen and water-rat, bunting and reed-warbler and weasel--presented for my entertainment.