Making Bird Friends 1 I
alight on our hands when we were on horseback: and once one of the Chickadees ate from our hands while we were in a canoe near the shore of the lake.
When we began to photograph them. we found that it took quite as much patience as taming them. The accompanying photographs were taken with a tripod camera with the lens a little less than three feet from the bird. In the first. I focused on the knothole in which we had placed suet. and then waited for a Nuthatch to come. The camera being so near. however, the click of the diaphragm shutter startled him.
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and he would move quickly enough to make a good picture impossible. I, consequently. had to make a business of clicking the shutter without exposing plates until he became used to the sound. This required time, and, it is needless to say, I spoiled more than one plate trying for pictures before I succeeded in getting a satisfactory one. I finally used an extra shutter for the "clicking." which enabled me to take the picture immediately after getting the bird used to the sound.
On March 27 we discovered one pair of our Nuthatches excavating a hole in a dead upright branch of a large sugar maple, some thirty or forty feet from the ground As near as we could tell, the female did all the work. and she was a very busy bird until the nest was com- pleted.—first carrying out chips and then carrying in the nesting material.
