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A backward season brings strangers into close company for a while. A white-throat sings his clear song of the North, and a moment later is answered by an oriole's melody, or the sweet tones of a rose-breasted grosbeak the latter one of those rarely favoured birds, exquisite in both plumage and song.
One May I saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feet above our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearly every minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence. Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building as they do in song.
Then, its range of tints, so varied, so subdued, and so beautiful, whether of pure white, like the Martin's, or pure green, like the Robin's, or dotted and mottled into the loveliest of browns, like the Red Thrush's, or aqua-marine, with stains of moss-agate, like the Chipping-Sparrow's, or blotched with long weird ink-marks on a pale ground, like the Oriole's, as if it bore inscribed some magic clue to the bird's darting flight and pensile nest.
The oriole's dusky relatives have the organs of song well developed; and although most of the species have altogether lost the art of music, there are none of them, even now, that do not betray more or less of the musical impulse.
In this blackbird family one of the little ones had taken his first ambitious flight to the oriole's tree, where he must and should be fed and comforted, in spite of the hostile reception of its gayly dressed proprietor.
It belongs to a different order of things, the order of mechanical contrivances, and was of course "made up," probably from a real oriole's nest, and the writer who vouches for its genuineness has been the victim of a clever practical joke a willing victim, no doubt, since he is looking in Nature for just this kind of thing, and since he believes there is "absolutely no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of Nature even in a single species."
And he went out by the big elm and stood under the Oriole's nest. "The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled." That is the way it began and he started: "The boy stood on the burning deck" then he had to stop, for Mr. Stuck-up, the Turkey, was taking his afternoon parade right near him. Mr. Stuckup didn't seem to like that piece at all. Neither did Jehosophat, for that matter.
Oriole's nest, sit chattering on a bough above, and pour forth floods of advice, which, poor little Mrs. Oriole used to say to her husband, bewildered her more than a hard north-east storm. "Depend upon it, my dear," Mother Magpie would say, "that this way of building your nest, swinging like an old empty stocking from a bough, isn't at all the thing.
Closer to the fence are lemon-yellow coreopsis with quaint, three-cleft leaves; thimble weeds with fruit columns half a finger's length; orange-flowered milkweed, like the color of an oriole's back, made doubly gay by brilliant butterflies and beetles.
These nests become increasingly complex and specialized, until we reach the oriole's home with its wonderfully woven mass of fiber, which, in spite of its apparent looseness, supports well the weight of the mother bird and of her eggs. The robin, not content with making a woven basket, plasters it with clay, and makes an absolutely impervious nest.
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