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Updated: July 10, 2025
The beautiful orioles are birds of the plains rather than of the hills. The cock is a bright yellow bird with a pink bill. There is some black on his cheeks and wing feathers. The hen is less brilliantly coloured, the yellow of her plumage being dull and mixed with green. Orioles are a little larger than bulbuls. They rarely, if ever, descend to the ground.
Memories of boyhood began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented wreaths of his Havana. . . . The golden oriole's flute-like whistle poured down from some leafy summit in a sudden stream of melody. A hurried note, he thought; expressed without much feeling from duty rather than inclination; not like the full-throated ease of other orioles in other lands he knew.
The Baltimore orioles as a rule are not so secretive; yet during the summer of 1898 a pair of these firebirds led me a fruitless chase. Their secret was not divulged until the leaves had fallen the next autumn, when there the nest hung in the midst of a tall cottonwood in my back yard close to the house.
In this place we were struck for the first time with the sight of those nests in the shape of bottles, or small bags, which are suspended from the branches of the lowest trees, and which attest the wonderful industry of the orioles, which mingle their warbling with the hoarse cries of the parrots and the macaws.
Rose had been content with a tiny little cottage set in a green yard gay with bright old fashioned flowers. He and Rose had nested as happily as the orioles in the maples, especially after the gold-haired baby came. Was Carlotta so different from Rose? Was her happiness such a different kind of thing? Were women not pretty much alike at heart? Did they not want about the same things?
By the road side I had just passed Carolina wrens, house wrens, a chipper, a field sparrow, two thrashers, an abundance of chewinks, two orchard orioles, several tanagers, a flock of quail, and mocking-birds and cardinals uncounted. In a pine wood near by, a wood pewee, a pine warbler, a yellow-throated warbler, and a pine-wood sparrow were singing a most peculiarly select and modest chorus.
Indeed, I did not discover it until autumn came, long after the orioles, old and young, had taken flight to a balmier clime, and the trees were stripped of their leaves, when, lo! it appeared in plain view on one of the trees on the opposite side of the street, the very place where I had not thought of looking for it.
But all the blessed company of mere songbirds, warblers, robins, thrushes, orioles, with nuthatches, chickadees, blue jays, woodpeckers, etc., counted only one head each. The heads of the birds were hastily wrung off and thrust into the game-bags to be counted, saving the bodies only of what were called game, the larger squirrels, bob-whites, partridges, etc.
The next case contains the varieties of the American Icteric Orioles, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, like the cuckoo. Among the varieties, the visitor should notice the red-winged, crested, and banana orioles. The African and Indian Weavers, so called from the peculiar construction of their nests, occupy the case next to that filled by the orioles.
On those islands which had ever formed a part of the South American continent, we should be sure to find such common birds as chatterers and toucans and hummingbirds, and some of the peculiar American quadrupeds; while on those which had been separated from Africa, hornbills, orioles, and honeysuckers would as certainly be found.
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