Home-making Time For Songbirds

All is bustle about the house

All is bustle about the house. Keen little eyes inspect eaves and windowsills, veranda vine, and shade tree. Blithe songs and chatterings announce that June-home-making time for most of our song birds-has arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird, who have spent several weeks arguing the relative merits of three boxes on the second story windowsills, suddenly discover that a swallow family has moved into the one with the delightful sunset view. While the swallows are out questing for summer insects, however, Mrs. Bluebird takes possession-now satisfied that the location is most to be desired-and even the intrepid swallows are unable to evict her.

In the vine that shades the veranda, the chipping sparrow lines with hair her nest of fine grasses and curly rootlets. On the other side of the front porch the humming bird binds the softest of plant fibers together with webs of spiders, and in this tiny lichen-decked home prepares to rear her diminutive family. In the tree nearby the vireo suspends her little cup of a nest in the crotch of a branch. In the marsh across the field the yellowthroat weaves a loose nest among the reeds near the home of the red-winged blackbird. Poised over the Spring meadows, the bobolink, he of poetry and song, pours forth his rollicking notes, an ever welcome member of the summer colony.

Hidden somewhere in the field below is the grass-lined nest presided over by his demure mate. One not wise in the ways of bobolink would never suspect her of being related to him at all; but, after the family is raised and they have paid their rent by destroying many injurious insects and weed seeds, he changes his gay coat for one which matches hers and joins the flocks on their way south. Here he is called rice bird and becomes plump and fat so that when he reaches his winter resort in Jamaica he is given a third name, butter bird. The tree swallow, first to return in the Spring, is one of the birds which is still in process of accommodating himself to the ways of man, and uses either boxes or holes in trees and stumps. In the grass and feather-lined interior are placed the four or five white eggs.

On the outermost end of a high elm branch, swaying gently in the breeze, one of the most marvelous of bird structures challenges any enemy to do its inmates harm. Eight inches long and gourd-shaped, it is woven of plant fibers, strips of bark and other similar materials upon a suspended warp. The female does the weaving while her gay, handsome mate sings to her. She is a modern person who uses twine to strengthen her building. She lays four to six brown-penciled white eggs. It is said that her children are great crybabies, but this cannot be for lack of a comfortable cradle.

by: David Bunch

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