My Garden Acquaintance | Page 9

it drops to you filtered
through five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all
smaller birds makes the moral character of the row, for all his
deaconlike demeanor and garb, somewhat questionable. He could never
sally forth without insult. The golden robins, especially, would chase
him as far as I could follow with my eye, making him duck clumsily to
avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he robbed
any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas-works, which, in our
free-and-easy community, is allowed to poison the river, supplied him
with dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making his
periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back with a fish in his
beak to his young savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition
which makes it savory to the Kanakas and other corvine races of men.

(1) See Rousseau's *La Nouvelle Heloise.*
Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven males flashing
about the garden at once. A merry crew of them swing their hammocks
from the pendulous boughs. During one of these later years, when the
canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to
the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose
trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the ash and
the button-wood. One year a pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built
a second next in an elm within a few yards of the house. My friend,
Edward E. Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all
strands of brilliant color, and I thought it a striking example of that
instinct of concealment noticeable in many birds, though it should seem
in this instance that the nest was amply protected by its position from
all marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the
fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on the
lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of our
drawing-room window, and so low that I could reach it from the
ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with ravellings of
woollen carpet in which scarlet predominated. Would the same thing
have happened in the woods? Or did the nearness of a human dwelling
perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security? They are very bold,
by the way, in quest of cordage, and I have often watched them
stripping the fibrous bark from a honeysuckle growing over the very
door. But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant
at will, and they were landlords. With shame I confess it, I have been
bullied even by a hummingbird. This spring, as I was cleansing a
pear-tree of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came purring
toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with
angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was
sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This
summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened their
mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm which the orioles had
enlivened the year before. We watched all their proceedings from the
window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nestlings grow from
black needles with a tuft of down at the lower end, till they whirled
away on their first short experimental flights. They became strong of

wing in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male bird
after, though the female was regular as usual in her visits to our
petunias and verbenas. I do not think it ground enough for a
generalization, but in the many times when I watched the old birds
feeding their young, the mother always alighted, while the father as
uniformly remained upon the wing.
The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling through the
garden in blossoming-time, but this year, owing to the long rains early
in the season, their favorite meadows were flooded, and they were
driven to the upland. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass
field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and,
while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle away, quivering
round the entire field of five acres, with no break in his song, and settle
down again among the blooms, to be hurried away almost immediately
by a new rapture of music. He had the volubility of an Italian charlatan
at a fair, and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some
quack remedy. *Opodeldoc-
opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Lincoln's-opodeldoc!* he seemed to repeat over
and over again, with