Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1877 — Fighting For a Home. [ARTICLE]

Fighting For a Home.

A woodpecker’s hole is such a very convenient place for a nest, that many other birds are glad to find one unoccupied. Sometimes a pair of wrens will watch the motions of the woodpeckers while they are at work, until an unfinished hole is left unguarded, when they will take possession of it. As soon as the lawful owners return, the thieves are driven off; but they are so persistent and troublesome that, although a woodpecker is larger and stronger than twenty wrens, the owners sometimes abandon the place, and make a new nest. Still, the wrens are not always allowed to keep the house they have stolen, for the blue-birds are equally covetous of it, and sometimes fight fiercely with the wrens in their attempts to gain possession of it. Occasionally, both wrens and blue-birds are driven away by the martins, for these birds also prize woodpeckers’ holes very highly. The fierce battles between these various birds over an abandoned hole are very amusing, and qften last several days: for they all are very obstinate birds, and as each one is determined not to give>up, the matter is not very easily settled.— Prof. W. K. Brooks, in St. Nicholas for June. The census returns of Sweden and Norway for the close of 1875 have just been published. The former has a population of 4,383,291, and the latter of 1,817,237, making the total population 6,200,528.