It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with an axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay with one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking, something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared. Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I had found my buzzard’s nest. Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that they ever hatched. But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. It was a right instinct which led the mother to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp and there hide her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness of things should have equaled hers, certainly, and I should have allowed her the privacy of the swamp. It was unfair of me and rude. Nature never intended a young buzzard for any eye but its mother’s, and _she_ hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and her maternal affections! The two freaks in the log must have been three weeks old, I should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered, as young owls are, with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded their legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these, their receding heads drawn back, their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tomcats. In order to examine them, I crawled into the den;—not a difficult act, for the opening measured four feet and a half at the mouth. The air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded tapestry over the walls. I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled at the end, and where I had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as you have seen an infusorian scud across the field of your microscope, there swept a meteor of black,—the buzzard! and evidently in that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied me in the log.