Gray Lady and the Birds: Stories of the Bird Year for Home and School

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“This Yellow-billed Cuckoo is a slender bird cloaked in brownish gray, of a soft hue and with a light belly. The tail-feathers are tipped with white, so that, as you look at the bird from below, it shows large white spots. This Cuckoo takes its name because the lower part of its bill is yellow, but you will scarcely notice this when he is in the trees, where he spends the greater part of his time in searching for insects and caterpillars, which are his favourite food.

YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO

“The nest is a shallow, rather shiftless sort of an affair, and very often has so little lining that if the vine or bush in which it is placed tips a little, the pale blue eggs are in danger of rolling out. What the Cuckoos lack in housekeeping thrift they make up as destroyers of harmful insects, and here it has helped to keep the old orchard alive by tearing apart the nests of the tent-caterpillar and eating the inhabitants. These mischievous caterpillars used to be content to live in the wild cherry trees that line the roads and old pastures. People cut these down in consequence, so after a time the caterpillar found that apple trees were quite as much to his taste and seized upon the orchards. Then comes Master Cuckoo, and wherever the tent worms are, there we find him also. So many has he been known to devour that one of the Wise Men, upon examining the stomach of a Cuckoo that had been killed, found it lined with a sort of felt made from the hairs of the caterpillars.

“So, if you hear the harsh call near by, be very glad; the sound may not please the ear, but the bird is a pleasure to the sight as he slips away silently through the trees to do work for us that we cannot do as well.

“The Red-eyed Vireo, excepting the Catbird, is the most talkative bird that we have; in fact, so fond is he of the sound of his own voice that he is rarely silent during the daylight hours. Then, too, his eloquence has a questioning and arguing quality that made Wilson Flagg give him the nickname of ‘The Preacher,’ by which he will always be known. ‘You see it—you know it—do you hear me? Do you believe it?’ he hears this voice say, and if you keep these words in your mind, you will recognize the bird the first time that you hear his song. You may hear the Vireo’s words twenty times for every peep that you may get of his person; not that he is at all shy, but he is restlessness in feathers, while unlike many talkers he both talks and works at the same time. Now he is at the end of a branch close to you, then on the opposite side of the tree, from whence he works his way to the very top, clearing the small limbs and twigs of insects as he goes.

“After trying in vain to see him, one day when you are not thinking of this or any other bird, you will pass a familiar tree, one of the apples, perhaps, whose branches nearly sweep the ground. Your eye in going idly over the leaves halts at an object that is partly suspended between the forked twigs of a branch almost under your eye. You look again; it is a nest, pocket-shaped, and fastened between the twigs as the heel of a stocking is held between knitting needles. The nest itself is finely woven of plant-down, soft bark, and perhaps a few shreds of paper.

“You step nearer; a little head with a long, curved beak rises slightly above the nest,—Madam is at home. An eye holds your own,—a red eye with a long, clear, white mark over it by way of an eyebrow. Then you notice the head wears a gray cap bordered with black. The bird perhaps breathes a little faster, and the prettily shaded olive-green back heaves and the wings twitch as if to make ready to fly, otherwise the bird does not budge, but simply sits and waits for you to go; this, if you are really one of the Kind Hearts, you will do very soon.

“True, you may come back the next day and the next, and from a comfortable distance watch the Vireo’s housekeeping and the progress of her brood, only please do not touch either the nest or its contents. After she has done with it and autumn comes, you may have it for your own and see for yourself how wonderfully it is made.

“All sorts of amusing bits of printing from newspapers have been found woven into these nests, and there is one in Goldilocks’ cabinet, that I will show you later, that says upon the shred of paper,—‘an eight-room flat,—electric light and —— —— improvements,’ the missing words being concealed where the paper was woven under the plant fibres.