The Children's Book of Birds

by Olive Thorne Miller

The ordinary food of this bird is insects that are found on trees, especially among fruit. But they have taken to fly-catching also. A party of them may often be seen busily at work catching flies. This is a very good thing for them as well as for us. The birds or beasts who can eat only one sort of food are called "single-food" animals, and they are growing scarcer every day. They need a change of diet to flourish. We should be sorry to have cedar-birds become scarce.

Cedar-birds are fond of cherries,—as I said,—but they eat hundreds of cankerworms to one cherry. So they earn all they have. Besides, if they can get wild cherries, they prefer them. They have been proved to be among our most useful birds. In one hundred and fifty-two stomachs that were examined, only nine had cultivated cherries.

Cedar-birds eat caterpillars and grubs, and are very fond of the elm-leaf beetle. They have been known to clear the elm-trees of a whole town, where the trees had been stripped for several years before they came. Besides insects, they eat the berries of many wild bushes and trees, such as wild cherry, dogwood, June-berry, elder, and others. They always prefer wild to cultivated berries.

One spring I saw a little flock of cedar-birds in an orchard full of blossoming apple-trees. They spent nearly all their time going over the trees, and working among the blossoms. One who was careless about it might have thought they were destroying apple buds, for they did eat many of the white petals of the flowers. But I wanted to be sure, so I watched carefully with my glass. Then I stayed by that orchard till October, and I never saw trees so loaded with apples as they were. Many branches lay on the ground with their weight of fruit, and in the whole orchard there was but one insect nest. That showed not only that the cedar-birds had done no harm, but that probably they had destroyed thousands of insects that would have done harm.

A bird classed with the waxwings is a California bird, the Phainopepla, or Shining Crested Flycatcher. He is glossy bluish black in color, with large white spots in the wings, which show only when flying. His mate is brownish gray. They are rather slim birds, nearly as big as a catbird.

The phainopepla is a beautiful fellow, with an elegant pointed crest, and plumage shining like satin. He sits up very straight on his perch, but he is a rather shy bird, and so not much is known about his ways. He is a real mountain lover, living on mountains, or in cañons, or the borders of small streams of California, Arizona, and Texas.

As you see by one of his names, he is a flycatcher. Sometimes thirty or forty of them may be seen in a flock, all engaged in catching flies. But like the cedar-bird, he is also fond of berries. When berries are ripe on the pepper-trees, he comes nearer to houses to feast on the beautiful red clusters.

The song of this bird is said to be fine, and like many other birds, he sometimes utters a sweet whisper song.

The nest is placed on a branch, not very high up in a tree, and is often, perhaps always, made of flower stems with the flowers on, with fine strips of bark, grasses, and plant down.

What is curious, and rare among birds, the male phainopepla insists on making the nest himself. He generally allows his mate to come and look on, and greets her with joyous song, but he will not let her touch it till all is done. Sometimes he even drives her away. When all is ready for sitting, he lets her take her share of the work, but even then he appears to sit as much as she. Miss Merriam found a party of these birds on some pepper-trees, and to her we owe most of what we know of their habits.