The wolf, the bison, the beaver fought the battle out at once to all but the bitter end. The crow, the muskrat, the fox have more than held their own, by reason of cunning, hiding or quickness of sight; but they cannot hope for this to last. The English sparrow has won by sheer audacity; but most to be admired are those creatures which have so changed their habits that some product of man's invention serves them as well as did their former wilderness home. The eave swallow and barn swallow and the chimney swift all belie their names in the few wild haunts still uninvaded by man. The first two were originally cliff and bank haunters, and the latter's home was a lightning-hollowed tree. But the nighthawks which soar and boom above our city streets, whence come they? Do they make daily pilgrimages from distant woods? The city furnishes no forest floor on which they may lay their eggs. Let us seek a wide expanse of flat roof, high above the noisy, crowded streets. Let it be one of those tar and pebble affairs, so unpleasant to walk upon, but so efficient in shedding water. If we are fortunate, as we walk slowly across the roof, a something, like a brownish bit of wind-blown rubbish, will roll and tumble ahead of us. It is a bird with a broken wing, we say. How did it ever get up here? We hasten forward to pick it up, when, with a last desperate flutter, it topples off the edge of the roof; but instead of falling helplessly to the street, the bird swings out above the house-tops, on the white-barred pinions of a nighthawk. Now mark the place where first we observed the bird, and approach it carefully, crawling on hands and knees. Otherwise we will very probably crush the two mottled bits of shell, so exactly like pebbles in external appearance, but sheltering two little warm, beating hearts. Soon the shells will crack, and the young nighthawks will emerge,--tiny fluffs,--in colour the very essence of the scattered pebbles. In the autumn they will all pass southward to the far distant tropics, and when spring again awakens, the instinct of migration will lead them, not to some mottled carpet of moss and rocks deep in the woods, but to the tarred roof of a house in the very heart of a great city. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JUNE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE GALA DAYS OF BIRDS Migration is over, and the great influx of birds which last month filled every tree and bush is now distributed over field and wood, from our dooryard and lintel vine to the furthermost limits of northern exploration; birds, perhaps, having discovered the pole long years ago. Now every feather and plume is at its brightest and full development; for must not the fastidious females be sought and won?