On islets off the New Zealand coast lives a rather large-sized lizard called _Sphenodon_. It's rather well known by name, at least, for it is one of those relics of a formerly more widespread group which are called living fossils. It is also noted for its remarkable development of a pineal eye, the remnant of an important sense organ in ancestral forms, and formerly an organ some philosophers supposed to be the seat of the soul. But here we are interested in the fact that petrels swarm to these same islands to dig their burrows and lay their eggs in them, and it is in these same burrows that _Sphenodon_ spends its daylight hours. Apparently the insect-eating _Sphenodon_ and the oceanic-feeding petrels share the burrows amicably, adding still another example of a rather long list of dissimilar organisms whose lives are associated. BIRD APARTMENT HOUSES [Illustration] Every now and then in our press appear blasts against crowded living conditions in our cities, and the tenements where people are crowded together. Often there is the implication that this type of thing is unnatural and abnormal. And yet when we look about us in the bird world we see that gregariousness is a common trait. We have only to remember the great flocks of starlings and blackbirds in the autumn, or the massed flights of water fowl. Not only in traveling and in feeding, but also at nesting time birds may gather together, and some birds nest in such close association that the term "apartment houses" or "tenement" is really applicable. The martins' house on our lawn with perhaps dozens of closely spaced rooms (some houses have as many as two hundred rooms) is a case in point. The neat martin house, made of boards, is a man-made thing, but even before the white man came to this continent, and before the Choctaw Indians hung up groups of hollow gourds for the martin colonies to use, the martins nested in colonies. Even in recent years certain colonies we might consider unprogressive have been reported as using such diverse nesting situations as among the boulders of a lake shore in Minnesota, and the closely spaced woodpecker holes which riddled a dead pine in Florida. And probably it was always thus. The martins liked company at nesting.