Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo14amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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WORK OF THE MERIDEN BIRD CLUB 153 the window fits snugly and a door through which to put the food. The box is of course entirely open on the garden side and projects into the room for about a foot. The birds seem to enjoy it thoroughly and it adds such a cheery tone to the room that many who have seen it have become enthusiastic and have made similar boxes. Into this window box come woodpeckers, blue jays, juncos, chickadees and other birds; they are practically in the room with us with only a sheet of glass between and we are able to observe them and to photo- graph them at our leisure. The birds have be- come so well ac- quainted with the people in Meriden and their friendly at- titude toward them that it seems as though there is no limit to their tame- ness and especially is this true of the chick- adees. They alight upon our clothing when we go out, they perch upon the barrels of our guns when we walk abroad in pur- suit of their enemies, and they even come to take breakfast with us. At first when they would fly into the dining-room, they would seize the nuts scattered on the table for them and then be off, but in order to urge them to stay longer with us and to show them how welcome they were, we stitched the nuts to the tablecloth — and they stayed. Another thing that we have attempted to do for the birds is to provide them with
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A lady's hat where birds are safe houses and nest boxes so attractive that they would stay with us to make their nests and rear their young. The martins had not been seen in Meriden in twenty- five years and one of our aims was to attract them. We made houses from flour barrels and the martins did come back and although they did not actually nest with us they went so far as to tear out the nests of the tree swallows, and I think that next year they will decide to build. The humming birds would come with the lilacs and leave when they had faded, but with the use of bright artificial flowers in which were hidden vials of honey and water we per- suaded them to stay with us throughout the summer. An old shed of ours had been a favorite nesting place for the phoebes and when it became necessary for us to part with the shed it seemed as though we might lose the birds too, but shelves that I tacked up inside the veranda have served their purpose well and the phoebes continue to visit us. For the bi-rds which naturally nest in holes in trees, we imported nests that are exact facsimiles of their own but we had so much trouble about importing them that we now make them ourselves. Bird baths have formed another inter- esting feature of our work and last summer we observed eighteen different kinds of birds bathing at one of the baths. We placed flat stones in some of the baths so that the birds can go into the

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