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Updated: May 13, 2025
Then the grosbeaks, chats, and vireos had something to say, and the sun rose higher, the light grew stronger and the breeze rustled the treetops loudly; a cow bawled and the whole barnyard answered. The guineas were clucking, the turkey gobbler strutting, the hens calling, the chickens cheeping, the light streamed down straight overhead and the bees began to hum.
After a while he took a chicken from the market-basket, spread it on a toaster, and broiled it over the coals; he put the dishes on the hearth to warm, washed the celery, parched some grated corn over the coals while the chicken was broiling, talking the while of Tolstoy and of Maeterlinck, of orioles and vireos, of whatever we happened to touch upon.
The groves, in the tops of which the woodpeckers, warblers, and vireos disturbedly carried on the imperatively necessary work of rearing their broods, were gay with festoons of Chinese lanterns in readiness for the evening.
However, in a few days I found my way again to the breezy hilltop. The chats, vireos, and indigo birds gave due warning of my approach, and I felt sure that Master Kentucky and his mate would be on their guard. To my delight, in a few minutes the female presented herself in one of the trees, her bill holding a bunch of worms.
The light in the woodlands becomes more subdued and the carpet of ferns and flowers grows richer and more beautiful. The vireos, the cardinal and the tanager add to the brilliancy and the ovenbird and veery to the melody.
The Warblers mostly have smooth slender beaks, but the Vireos have stouter ones, with a little hooked point that enables them to pick out and secure a great variety of insects. The Chat is our only Warbler with a very stout beak, even stouter than a Vireo's, but it has no hook at the end.
It would take a whole book to describe the butterflies; once in a while you scared up a big, wonderful moth, large as a sparrow; and the orchard was alive with doves, thrushes, catbirds, bluebirds, vireos, and orioles. When you climbed the fence, or a tree, and kept quiet, and heard the music and studied the pictures, it made you feel as if you had to put it into words.
The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at concealment except in the neutral tints, which made it look like a natural growth of the dim, gray woods.
He is the one Southern bird that I should perhaps be sorry to see common in Massachusetts; but that "perhaps" is a large word. Many yellow-throated warblers, silent as yet, were commonly in the live-oaks, and innumerable myrtle birds, also silent, with prairie warblers, black-and-white creepers, solitary vireos, an occasional chickadee, and many more.
In the same pine woods, too, there was much good music: house wrens, Carolina wrens, red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, pine warblers, yellow-throated warblers, blue yellowbacks, red-eyed chewinks, and, twice welcome, like the bluebirds, a Carolina chickadee.
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