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He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe. "'Grosbeak! Oh, but I love grosbeaks!
In early summer the bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes and shows his brilliant front.
Except a few old Indian trails, which the rain had half obliterated, he had no tracks to discover save Wetzel's, and these were as hard to find as the airy course of a grosbeak. On soft ground or marshy grass, which Wetzel avoided where he could, he left a faint trail, but on a hard surface, for all the traces he left, he might as well not have gone over the ground at all.
I should have welcomed any form of death, even the most horrible. I had grown morbid, and almost despaired. I had been prayed for again and again, but the healing touch came not. Life seemed to hold for me no ray of hope, no gleam of sunshine. As I lay brooding in my melancholy state, a red grosbeak, with his bright red plumage, alighted on a tree a few feet from my window.
"Are there no bright-colored birds that live all winter where the trees are bare?" asked Rap. "Yes, three the Cardinal, the Crossbill, and the Pine Grosbeak. They are seed-eating birds, and all belong to the Sparrow family.
Then he will grow to love you and be a charming pet, living happily and singing gladly; but under any other circumstances it is less cruel to shoot one than to make it a prisoner." The Rose-breasted Grosbeak Length about eight inches.
MacGillivray, the Scottish naturalist, reports that Audubon himself, in conversation, arranged our vocalists in the following order: first, the Mocking-Bird, as unrivalled; then, the Wood-Thrush, Cat-Bird, and Red Thrush; the Rose-Breasted, Pine, and Blue Grosbeak; the Orchard and Golden Oriole; the Tawny and Hermit Thrushes; several Finches, Bachmann's, the White-Crowned, the Indigo, and the Nonpareil; and finally, the Bobolink.
The grosbeak sang on, a big Turnus butterfly sailed through the arbour and poised over the table. Elnora held up a lump of sugar and the butterfly, clinging to her fingers, tasted daintily. With eager eyes and parted lips, the girl held steadily. When at last it wavered away, "That made a picture!" said Philip. "Ask me some other time how I lost my illusions concerning butterflies.
The hen grosbeak differs considerably in colour and marking both from the cock of her species and from the hen black-headed oriole. She is a dull ashy-grey bird, tinged faintly with yellowish red on the back and abdomen. Her wings and tail are black. The only young grosbeak that I have seen resembled the female in appearance, except that it had a yellow rump. It was being fed by a cock bird.
The male rose-breasted grosbeak assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.
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