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Updated: June 26, 2025
'Tis a simple proposition, after all, that ten times one is ten; and the bees, the ants, the grosbeaks, and the beavers prove it so clearly that any one of us may read, though we pass by never so quickly. Yet all great truths appear in man's mind in very rudimentary form at first, and each successive generation furnishes more favorable soil for their growth and development.
On the third morning after their arrival at the Vaal, they set off; accompanied by the Hottentots, to the plain which they had spoken of; riding through magnificent groups of acacia or camel-thorn trees, many of which were covered with the enormous nests of the social grosbeaks.
Hour after hour I have seen the mother of a brood of blue grosbeaks pass from the nearest meadow to the tree that held her nest, with a cricket or grasshopper in her bill, while her better-dressed half was singing serenely on a distant tree or pursuing his pleasure amid the branches.
This crimson breast shield, by the way, is the family mark or coat of arms of the grosbeaks, just as the scarlet crest marks all the woodpeckers. And if you ask a Micmac, deep in the woods, how the grosbeak got his shield, he may tell you a story that will interest you as did the legend of Hiawatha and the woodpecker in your childhood days.
Add to these things the fact that the grosbeaks are extremely confiding, and much more likely than the buntings to be seen from the windows of the house, and you have, perhaps, a sufficient explanation of the more general interest they excite.
The scenes through which they were passing were beautiful as Paradise, and all nature seemed alive and jubilant. The white blossoms of wild-plum-trees twinkled among dark evergreens, a vegetable imitation of starlight. Wide-spreading oaks and superb magnolias were lighted up with sudden flashes of color, as scarlet grosbeaks flitted from tree to tree.
The wood thrush and the hermit stand at the head as songsters, no two persons, perhaps, agreeing as to which is the superior. Under the general head of finches, Audubon describes over sixty different birds, ranging from the sparrows to the grosbeaks, and including the buntings, the linnets, the snowbirds, the crossbills, and the redbirds.
In fact, it eats enough potato-bugs at a single meal to pay for all the peas eaten in a whole season. One family of grosbeaks, nesting near the field, will keep an entire patch cleared of potato-bugs throughout the season.
With the pine grosbeaks the case is different. When a man sees a company of rather large birds about the evergreens in his door-yard, most of them of a neutral ashy-gray tint, but one or two in suits of rose-color, he is pretty certain to feel at least a momentary curiosity about them.
"Of course they don't live on buds and blossoms. If they did they would soon starve to death, for buds and blossoms don't last long. They eat a few just for variety, but they live mostly on bugs and insects. You ask Farmer Brown's boy who helps him most in his potato patch, and he'll tell you it's the Grosbeaks. They certainly do love potato bugs.
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