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

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“The female seems to be weaver-in-chief, using both claw and bill, though I have seen the male carry her material. It is asserted that Orioles will weave gayly coloured worsteds into their nests. This I very much doubt, or if they do, I believe it is for lack of something more suitable. I have repeatedly fastened varicoloured bunches of soft linen twine, carpet-thread, flosses, and the like under the bark of trees frequented by Orioles, and with one exception, it has been the more sombre tints that were selected, though I am told that nests are found made of very bright colours.

“In the exceptional case a long thread of scarlet linen floss was taken and woven into the nest for about half its length, the remainder hanging down; but on resuming my watch the next day, I found that the weaver had left the half-finished task and crossed the lawn to another tree. Whether it was owing to the presence of red squirrels close by, or that the red thread had been a subject for domestic criticism and dissension, we may not know.

“Be this as it may, in spite of the bright hues of the parent birds and the hanging shape of the nest that is never concealed by a branch upon which it is saddled, like the home of so many birds, an Oriole’s nest is exceedingly difficult to locate unless one has noticed the trips to and fro in the building process; but once the half-dozen white, darkly etched and spotted eggs it contains hatch out, the vociferous youngsters at once call attention to the spot and make their whereabouts known, in spite of sky cradle and carefully adjusted leaf umbrellas.

“If their parents bring them food, they squeal (yes, that is the only word for it); if they are left alone, they do likewise. Their baby voices can be heard above the wind, and it is only either at night or during a heavy shower, when a parent would naturally be supposed to be upon the nest, that they are silent.

“As an adult, the Oriole lives on rather mixed diet and has a great love of honey; but of course as a parent he is, with his sharp beak, a great provider of animal food for his home, and to his credit must be placed a vast number of injurious tree-top insects that escape the notice of less agile birds.

“Complaints are frequently heard of his propensity for opening pods and eating young peas, piercing the throats of trumpet-shaped flowers for the honey, and in the autumn, before the southward migration, siphoning grape and plum juice by means of this same slender, pointed bill.

“Personally, I have never lost peas through his appetite for green vegetables, though I have had the entire floral output of an old trumpet-vine riddled bud and blossom; and I have often stood and scolded them from under the boughs of a Spitzenburgh apple tree, amid the blossoms of which they were rummaging,—perhaps for insects, but also scattering the rosy blossoms right and left with torn and bruised petals. Powell, in The Independent, writes feelingly of this trait of the Oriole, thus:—

“ ‘An Oriole is like a golden shuttle in the foliage of the trees, but he is the incarnation of mischief. That is just the word for it. If there is anything possible to be destroyed, the Oriole likes to tear it up.

“ ‘He wastes a lot of string in building his nest. He is pulling off apple blossoms now, possibly eating a few petals. By and by he will pick holes in bushels of grapes, and in plum season he will let the wasps and hornets into the heart of every Golden Abundance plum on your favourite tree. . . . Yet the saucy scamp is so beautiful that he is tolerated—and he does kill an enormous lot of insects. There is a swinging nest just over there above the blackberry bushes. It is wonderfully woven and is a cradle as well as a house. I should like to have been brought up in such a homestead.’

“It seems as if the Oriole must be a descendant of one of the brilliant birds that inhabited North America in by-gone days of tropic heat and that has stayed on from a matter of hereditary association; for in the nesting season it is to be found from Florida and Texas up to New Brunswick and the Saskatchewan country and westward to the Rockies, beyond which this type is replaced by Bullock’s Oriole, of much similar colouring save that it has more orange on the sides of the head, and the white wing-patch is larger.