A-Birding on a Bronco

by Florence Merriam Bailey

AROUND OUR RANCH-HOUSE.

Close up under the hills, the old vine-covered ranch-house stood within a circle of great spreading live oaks. The trees were full of noisy, active blackbirds—Brewer's blackbirds, relatives of the rusty that we know in New York. The ranchman told me that they always came up the valley from the vineyard to begin gathering straws for their nests on his brother's birthday, the twenty-fifth of March. After that time it was well for passers below to beware. If an unwary cat, or even a hen or turkey gobbler, chanced under the blackbirds' tree, half a dozen birds would dive down at it, screaming and scolding till the intruders beat an humble retreat. But the blackbirds were not always the aggressors. I heard a great outcry from them one day, and ran out to find them collecting at the tree in front of the house. A moment later a hawk flew off with a young nestling, and was followed by an angry black mob.

One pair of the blackbirds nested in the oak by the side of the house, over the hammock. Though making themselves so perfectly at home on the premises, driving off the ranchman's cats and gobblers, and drinking from his watering-trough, if they were taken at close quarters, with young in their nests, the noisy birds were astonishingly timid. One could hardly understand it in them.

One afternoon I sat down under the tree to watch them. Mountain Billy rested his bridle on my knee, and the ranchman's dog came out to join us; but the mother blackbird, though she came with food in her bill and started to walk down the branch over our heads, stopped short of the nest when her eye fell on us. She shook her tail and called chack, and her mate, who sat near, opened wide his bill and whistled chee. The small birds were hungry and grew impatient, seeing no cause for delay, so raised their three fuzzy heads above the edge of the nest and sent imperative calls out of their three empty throats. As the parents did not answer the summons, the young dozed off again, but when the old ones did get courage to light near the nest there was such a rousing chorus that they flew off alarmed for the safety of their clamorous brood. After that outbreak, it seemed as if the mother bird would never go back to her children; but finally she came to the tree and, after edging along falteringly, lit on a branch above them. The instant she touched foot, however, she was seized with nervous qualms and turned round and round, spreading her tail fan-fashion, as if distracted.

To my surprise, it was the father bird who first went to the nest, though he had the wit to go to it from the outside of the tree, where he was less exposed to my dangerous glance. I wondered whether it was mother love that kept her from the nest when he ventured, or merely a case of masculine common-sense versus nerves. How birds could imagine more harm would be done by going to the nest than by making such a fuss five feet away from it was a poser to me. Perhaps they attribute the same intelligence to us that some of us do to them!

While the blackbirds were making such a time over our heads, I watched the hummingbirds buzzing around the petunias and pink roses under the ranch-house windows, and darting off to flutter about the tubular flowers of the tobacco-tree by the well. One day the small boy of the family climbed up to the hummingbird's nest in the oak "to see if there were eggs yet," and the frightened brood popped out before his eyes. His sister caught one of them and brought it into the house. When she held it up by the open door the tiny creature spread its little wings and flew out into the vines over the window. The child was so afraid its mother would not find it she carried it back to its oak and watched till the mother came with food. The hummers were about the flowers in front of the windows so much that when the front door was left open they often came into the room.

In an oak behind the barn I found a hummingbird's nest, and, yielding to temptation, took out the eggs to look at them. In putting them back one slipped and dropped on the hard ground, cracking the delicate pink shell as it fell. The egg was nearly ready to hatch, and I felt as guilty as if having killed a hummingbird.

Arizona Hooded Oriole. (One half natural size.)

Baltimore Oriole—Eastern. (One half natural size.)

When in the hammock under the oak one day, I saw a pair of the odd-looking Arizona hooded orioles busily going and coming to a drooping branch on the edge of the tree. They had a great deal to talk about as they went and came, and when they had gone I found, to my great satisfaction, that they had begun a nest. They often use the gray Spanish moss, but here had found a good substitute in the orange-colored parasitic vine of the meadows known among the people of the valley as the 'love-vine' (dodder). The whole pocket was composed of it, making a very gaudy nest.

Linnets nested in the same old tree. Indeed, it is hard to say where these pretty rosy house finches, cousins of our purple finches, would not take it into their heads to build. They nested over the front door, in the vines over the windows, in the oaks and about the outbuildings, and their happy musical songs rang around the ranch-house from morning till night. As I listened to their merry roundelay day after day during that beautiful California spring, it sounded to me as though they said, "How-pretty-it-is'-out, how-pretty-it-is'-out, how-pretty-it-is'!" The linnets are ardent little wooers, singing and dancing before the indifferent birds they would win for their mates. I once saw a rosy lover throw back his pretty head and hop about before his brown lady till she was out of patience and turned her back on him. When that had no effect, she opened her bill, spread her wings, and leaned toward him as if saying, "If you don't stop your nonsense, I'll——" But the fond linnets' gallantry and tenderness are not all spent in the wooing. When the mother bird was brooding her nest over our front door, her crimson-throated mate stood on the peak of the ridgepole above and sang blithely to her, turning his head and looking down every little while to make sure that she was listening to his pretty prattle.