Most birds, however, do not take their dinner at night, and therefore it is easier to watch them at their _table d'hote_. One day a red-headed woodpecker was giving a strapping youngster as large as herself his noonday meal. She came close to him with a morsel in her long bill, and, after pounding it awhile against a limb, she thrust it into the screaming youngling's mouth. But she had failed to reduce it to a swallowable size; it stuck in his throat, and, do what he would, he could not bolt it. It was so large that he was choking; what should be done? The simplest thing you can conceive. The mother bird reached over and impatiently jerked the refractory morsel out of her baby's throat, thumped it vigorously several times against the branch, then gave it to him again, as much as to say, "Now try it! I guess you can manage it this time." And he did, for down his gullet it went with very little effort. Then she went after more provender for his spacious craw. Whenever she came with a tidbit, she would first drop it into a kind of pocket in the bark, and pound it a while to reduce it to a proper consistency; the while the youngster would sit near and watch her with hungry eyes, and often scream in his coaxing way and twinkle his wings, until she was ready to deliver up the tempting fragment. Once, after she had given him all she had brought, he still opened his mouth and whimpered for more. At this exhibition of gluttony she lost her patience. Would he never be satisfied, the great, greedy, overgrown lubber? He was simply making a slave and a drudge of her. She looked at him for a moment with a savage glitter in her dark eyes, then began to peck him angrily right in the mouth, and drove him peremptorily backward down the limb. Mother patience has its limitations in the bird world as well as elsewhere. On the same day a bank swallow was feeding her little ones, a half dozen or so, which were ranged on a willow stem at the margin of the river. Every time she flew toward them they set up a vigorous calling to be fed. She procured her food by skimming airily over the river and catching the insects that rose from its surface. Having nabbed one, she would dart with it to her little family, and, without alighting, and scarcely pausing in her swift flight, would thrust it into the mouth of one of the birdkins. Thus she fed them one by one until she had gone the round of the little circle, though sometimes, oddly enough, she would serve the same infant twice in succession.