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Weeds that yield neither pasturage for bee nor herd yet afford seeds to the fall and winter birds. This is true of most of the obnoxious weeds of the garden, and of thistles. The wild lettuce yields down for the hummingbird's nest, and the flowers of whiteweed are used by the kingbird and cedar-bird.
"Did you say your fighting cousin?" he asked in a hesitating way. "That's what I said," replied Chebec. "He is Scrapper the Kingbird, as of course you know. The rest of us always feel safe when he is about." "Of course I know him," declared Peter, his face clearing. "Where is he now?"
The song of the bobolinks dropped from above, and the microphonic tune of the sparrows came up from the grass, sky and earth keeping holiday together. Almost I could have believed myself in Eden. But, alas, even the birds themselves were long since shut out of that garden of innocence, and as I started back toward the village a crow went hurrying past me, with a kingbird in hot pursuit.
In fact, this elaborate dressing of feathers was their constant business for so long a time that I thought it no wonder the grown-up kingbird pays little attention to his dress; he does enough pluming in the nursery to last a lifetime.
"That is the Kingbird," said the Doctor; "one of the most useful of the insect-catchers. Instead of living on honey-bees, as many people think, he eats very few of these, but kills instead thousands of the bad robber-fly, which is the honey-bee's worst enemy. This bird is really king of the air and of all fly-catching birds. See how graceful his flight is, and how easily be moves!"
As he drew near, the alarmed robin uttered his baby cry, when instantly the kingbird wheeled and left; nor did he notice the stranger again, although he stayed there a long time. But when an old robin came to attend to his wants, that was a different matter; the kingbird went at once for the grown-up bird, thus proving that he spared the first one because of his babyhood.
It has but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest a mere platform of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds from the deep, compact, finely woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or the kingbird, and what a gulf between its indifference toward its young and their solicitude!
There was not an hour of the day, often from four A.M. to eight P.M., that I had not the kingbird and his nest directly in sight, and hardly a movement of his life escaped me. There he stood, on the fence under his tree, on a dead bush at the edge of the bay, or on the lowest limb of a small pear-tree in the yard.
The thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their coming till then.
The robin, the sparrow, the pewee, etc., will rear, or make the attempt to rear, two and sometimes three broods in a season; but the bobolink, the oriole, the kingbird, the goldfinch, the cedar-bird, the birds of prey, and the woodpeckers, that build in safe retreats, in the trunks of trees, have usually but a single brood. If the boblink reared two broods, our meadows would swarm with them.
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