Excerpt from Chickens and How to Raise Them: All About Chickens, How to Hatch, House, Feed and Fatten Them, and Cure Their Diseases

Here, however, we are mainly concerned with bird life, and turning again to Nature as a guide, in the matter of incubation particularly, what do we find? Many object lessons of value, many which are complex and hard to under stand. Nests for the reception of birds' eggs are made of every conceivable shape and form, or they are not made at all, the eggs belng merely deposited on a bare slab of rock. The Long tailed Tit and the Wren often choose the most sheltered sites for their nests, and build them domed, of the warmest material, and of great thickness. A thin, airy platform of twigs high up on some naked bough is all that the Wood Pigeon makes for her'nest and nursery. There are nests far down in a deep, dark hole of a tree, or swinging in a frail basket-work of grass and twigs at the end of a bough. The Ostrich hens scrape a large hole in the sand with their feet, and in it a great number of eggs are deposited -not by one bird, but by the whole colony. Much of the heat necessary for incubation in this case is provided by the sun-warmed sand, but the cock bird sits upon the nest by night.

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