The young are very timid creatures and keep close to their parents. Considerable solicitude is shown by the latter for their well-being. Their helpless infancy, so to speak, is watched over with all the care that a human mother bestows upon her offspring, and when their lives are endangered recourse is had to many a _ruse_ to deceive their enemies and bring them into places of security. When severely pressed by foes, the mother, by a peculiar alarm, warns them of the state of things, and while they are scattering in different directions seeks to attract attention to herself in many a well-feigned artifice. In her anxiety for their safety, she has even been observed to seize between her two feet a youngling and fly with it away--a behavior whose purpose seemed to be the diversion of the enemy from the rest of the brood, thus giving them a chance to flee from impending peril to places of security in the surrounding verdure. After all danger has disappeared, she summons them together again by a familiar call, and doubtless relates to them the story of her adventures and the dangers from which they were saved. Worms, animalcula, ants and other soft-bodied insects, which the parents assist them in procuring from the soft earth, and from beneath the grass and dead leaves that abound in the places they frequent, constitute their food. Later on they are able to obtain their subsistence, with all the address of older birds, by thrusting their bills into the soil and in such other places as would be likely to contain the objects desired. Their tongues, covered with a viscid saliva, adhere to the food, and when drawn into the mouth carry it with them without danger of being lost. All who have made these birds a study have often discerned holes made in the soft mud by their bills. The presence of these “borings,” as they are called, is always an indication that game is not far distant, which a careful exploration of the locality soon verifies. The young, when matured, continue to occupy the same haunts with their parents, and, unless brought to an untimely death by the merciless gun of the hunter, repair to the warm, sunny, smiling South with the return of frost. In the Middle States--and the same is doubtless true of other sections of our great country--there is never more than a single brood raised, although the early breeding of the species would certainly afford time for a second hatching before the close of the season. Less pyriform are the eggs of the Woodcock than waders’ mostly are, being, in some instances, almost ovoidal. Their ground-color varies from a light clay to one of buffy-brown, and the markings occur in the form of fine spots and blotches of chocolate-brown, interspersed with others of obscure lilac, more or less thickly scattered over the surface of the egg, their size and intensity of color bearing, in general, a direct correspondence with the depth of the background. Remarkable variations of size exist