Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1891 — BATTLE OF BIRDS. [ARTICLE]

BATTLE OF BIRDS.

How Two Wren* Fought Two Bluo Birds ami Whipped Tliom. In Silver Lake Township, Pennsylvania, a two-story stone milk-house lias been standing for more than fifty years. When the masons built it they knocked the mouth from an old earthen jug, and cemented the jug into the solid wall toward the peak, leaving the open end on the outside of the wall. The kind-hearted workmen put the jug there for a purpose, and every summer since then wrens have built their nests in it. This season a pair of blue-birds got there a few hours before the wrens did, took possession of the jug without any ceremony, and began to carry bits of straw and dried grass into it, flying out and in again every fifteen or twenty minutes. Toward noon a pair of wrens flitted into the yard, and flew around the milk-house two or three times. Then they made a dive for the opening in the old jug, darted into it, anti soon flew out squalling spitefully. The reason why they did this was because they found one of the blue birds in there, very busy fixing things up Inside. The surprised blue bird followed the wrens, and then a feathered warfare began that lasted for two hours. Finding a stranger in a home that had been occupied by wrens for half a century made the little wrens mad all over. They pitched into the blue bird and tried to drive it away, piping and screeching as they fought. For a time the blue bird battled with the wrens; but the two were more than a match for it, and it retired to a tree. While it was perched there the wrens flew into the jug, and started to drag out the straw and stuff the blue birds had carried in.

The wrens were busy cleaning out the jug when the blue bird on the tree was joined by its mate. All at once they flew in a straight line for the jug. They darted into it like a flash, and in a second the wrens came out as though they had been fired. They had not been cowed by the larger birds, however, for they immediately turned, darted into the jug, and drove the blue birds out. Then the four birds had it back and forth among the trees for half an hour, neither party entering the jug while the battle lasted.

Finally they stopped fighting, and each side began to carry things into the jug. The wrens made two trips while the blue birds made one, and late in the afternoon the wrens had tilled the jug so full of twigs that the blue birds could not get in. There was room for the wrens to go in and out, and they held the fort against their bigger foes, who made several attempts to tear the barrier of twig* away but without success. Toward sundown the birds Hew away and never came back: and the wrens have had possession of the jug ever since.— G-jldthwaite’s Geographical Magazine.