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Updated: May 13, 2025
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 make it look like a natural growth of the dim, gray woods.
Nesting cares have not yet made them fearful of showing their bright plumage, and scores of the scarlet and orange forms play among the branches. The flycatchers and vireos now appear in force little hunters of insects clad in leafy greens and browns, with now and then a touch of brightness as in the yellow-throated vireo or in the crest of the kingbird.
Unlike swallows, robins, bluebirds, blackbirds, and perhaps most of the sparrows, our smaller wood birds, the warblers and vireos especially, appear to move as a general thing in mixed flocks. Whenever the woods are full of them, as is the case now and then every spring and fall, one of the most striking features of the show is the number of species represented.
But any interested person can acquaint himself with most of our song-birds by keeping in mind a few general divisions, and observing the characteristics of each. By far the greater number of our land-birds are either warblers, vireos, flycatchers, thrushes, or finches. The warblers are, perhaps, the most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds.
Farther along the creek, on the border of the swamp, the red-shouldered blackbirds were massed; chiming in everywhere sang the catbirds, white-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, orchard-orioles, and Maryland yellowthroats; and at short intervals, soaring for a moment high over the other voices, sounded the thrilling, throbbing notes of the cardinal, broken suddenly and drowned by the roll of the flicker, the wild, weird cry of the great-crested flycatcher, or the rapid, hay-rake rattle of the belted kingfisher.
The vireos, or greenlets, are a sort of connecting link between the warblers and the true flycatchers, and partake of the characteristics of both. The red-eyed vireo, whose sweet soliloquy is one of the most constant and cheerful sounds in our woods and groves, is perhaps the most noticeable and abundant species.
The warblers, the humming bird, the tanager, the bob-o-link, the ovenbird, the vireos, the chat, the red start, the oriole, the dickcissel, the black-billed cuckoo, all greeted their friends as numerously as ever.
Their redstart also builds under the eaves of houses; their starling in church steeples and in holes in walls; several thrushes resort to sheds to nest; and jackdaws breed in the crannies of the old architecture, and this in a much milder climate than our own. They have in that country no birds that answer to our tiny, lisping wood-warblers, genus Dendroica, nor to our vireos, Vireonidoe.
In July the incessant, cry-baby twittering of the young orioles is thus as common a sound of the orchard and pasture as it is of the elm-shaded street. Other apple tree nest-hangers are the vireos, yellow throated, red-eyed and white-eyed, all of whom love to build on the low-swinging tips of the benedictory limbs.
She looked around her unceasingly, at the sky, at the trees, at the flowers and ferns and fields, at the vireos and thrushes, the robins and tanagers gashing in and out amidst the foliage, and she was filled with a strange yearning to expand and expand until she should become a part of all nature, be absorbed into it, cease to be herself.
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