A TALKING ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK.
Early last summer, while standing on my back steps, I heard a cheerful voice say, “You’re a pretty bird. Where are you?” I supposed it to be the voice of a Parrot, but wondered how any Parrot could talk loud enough to be heard at that distance, for the houses on the street back of us are quite a way off.
Almost before I had done laughing, the voice came again, clear, musical, and strong—“You’re a pretty bird. Where are you?”
For several days I endured the suspense of waiting for time to investigate. Then I chased him up. There he was in the top of a walnut tree, his gorgeous attire telling me immediately that he was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.
At the end of a week he varied his compliment to, “Pretty, pretty bird, where are you? Where are you?” with a kind of impatient jerk on the last “you.”
He and his mate stayed near us all last summer, and though I heard him talk a hundred times, yet he always brought a feeling of gladness and a laugh.
Our friend has come back again this spring. About May 1st I heard the same endearing compliment as before.
Several of my friends whom I have told about him have asked, “Does he say the words plainly? Do you mean that he really talks?” My reply is, “He says them just as plainly as a bird ever says anything, so plainly, that even now I laugh whenever I hear him.”
He is not very easily frightened, and sometimes talks quite a while when I am standing under the tree where he is.
—Emily B. Pellet, Worcester, Mass., in Bird-Lore.