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Updated: June 18, 2025
Dove's wings and the rosy breast of the grosbeak completed the barbarous display. How my heart sickened as I gazed at these pleasant, refined, soft-voiced women flaunting the trophies of their cruelty in the beautiful sunlight. Had they no compassion for the feathered mother who had been robbed of her young for the sake of a hat? "Oh, how can they do such dreadful, such wicked things!" I moaned.
The scarlet plumage of the cardinal grosbeak flashed under the beams of the setting sun; and the trumpet-note of the ivory-billed woodpecker was heard near the centre of the island. For some time the party remained silent, each contemplating the scene with feelings of pleasure. Francois, as usual, first broke the silence. "I say, cook, what's for dinner to-morrow?"
The bush-tit feeds largely on insects that destroy grape-vines and on the black olive scale. Other species eat most of the scales which infest fruit and forest trees. The rose-breasted grosbeak, while it eats a few green peas, is to be classed among the wholly beneficial birds, for it is the great natural destroyer of the Colorado potato beetle.
The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, which Audubon places so high on his list of minstrels, comes annually to one region in this vicinity, but I am not sure of having heard it. The young Pine Grosbeaks come to our woods in winter, and have then but a subdued twitter.
He was black and white on top, but when he went by I saw he had a beautiful spot on the breast like a shield sort of pink red, the color of raspberries, you know." "That was the Rose-breasted Grosbeak," said the Doctor. "Now, we have pockets full of material for bird stories, enough to last a week.
Grosbeaks live in forests, and go about either in couples or in small companies. They seem to feed largely on the ground, picking up insects. The beak of the finch tribe is adapted to a diet of seeds; nevertheless, many finches vary this food with insects. I saw a grosbeak seize, shake, and devour a caterpillar about two inches in length. Grosbeaks also eat berries and stone fruit.
Indeed, these two birds so much resemble each other in color, form, manner, voice, and general habits that, were it not for the difference in size, the grosbeak being nearly as large again as the indigo-bird, it would be a hard matter to tell them apart. The females of both species are clad in the same reddish-brown suits. So are the young the first season.
Without warning, a grosbeak the one whose breast is stained with the blood of the rose began his soft, sweet song so close overhead that Barbara started up, and he flew. She waited to catch the strain again, and as it drifted back her glance met her lover's. She smiled tenderly, but was grave the next moment and said, "Let us go back."
We shall forget these first humble flowers of spring by-and-by when we find a brilliant cardinal flower, or a showy lady's slipper, just as we forget the timid, tender tones of the bluebird when the grand song of the grosbeak floods the evening air, or the exquisite melody of the hermit thrush spiritualizes the leafy woods; just as many a man forgets the ministrations of his humbler friends in early life when he has climbed into the society of those whom earth calls great.
I scaled a barbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. The grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Could the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with me.
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