I know—or knew—four birds, and to know a fair bird well is almost equal to knowing a fair woman well, though they have different ways. Two of these birds that I knew were orioles and two were bluebirds. The two orioles and the two bluebirds were husbands and wives. I stumbled upon them all last year. The bluebirds had a nest in a hole in a hard maple stump in a clearing in St. Clair County, Michigan. The orioles' nest was well woven in pear shape, dangling from close-swinging twigs at the end of an elm limb which hung over a creek in Orange County, Indiana. The male oriole attended faithfully to the wants of his soberer-hued wife sitting upon the four eggs in their nest. He was gorgeous all over, in his orange and black, and as faithfully and gallantly as the male bluebird did he regard his mate, and he was, if possible, even more jealous and watchful in his unwearied care of her.
They made two very happy and earnest families. Each male, in addition to caring for his mate, did good in the world for men and women. Each killed noxious worms and insects for food, and each, in the very exuberance of the flush year, and of living, gave forth at times such music that all men, women, and children who listened, though they might be dull and ignorant, somehow felt better, and were better as well as happier human beings. But there was death in the air. The male oriole and the male bluebird had each a brilliant coat!
Young were hatched in each of these two nests—vigorous, clamoring young, coming from the eggs of the beautiful bird couples. The father and mother oriole and the father and mother bluebird, each pair vain and prettily jubilant over what had happened, worked very hard to bring food to the open mouths of their offspring. The young ones were growing and flourishing, and they were all happy.
One day, in St. Clair County, Michigan, a man armed with a shotgun went out into a clearing. The shot in the gun was of the kind known as "mustard-seed." It is so fine that it will not mar the feathers of the bird it kills. On the same day, possibly, or at least very nearly at the same time, a man similarly armed strolled down beside a creek in Orange County, Indiana. The man in Michigan wanted to kill the beautiful male bluebird who was bringing food to his young ones. The man in Indiana wanted to kill the magnificent male oriole who was feeding his young birds in the nest. It was not difficult for either of these two brutes to kill the two happy bird fathers. They were business-like butchers, just of the type of man who make the dog-catchers in cities—and they had no nerves and shot well. One of them took home a beautiful dead oriole, and the other took not one but two beautiful bluebirds, for as the male bluebird came back to the nest with food for the younglings, it so chanced that the female came also, and the same charge of shot killed them both.
"She isn't quite as purty as the he-bird," said the man, as he picked up the two, "but maybe I can get a little something for her."
The man who shot the oriole would have gladly committed and profited by a similar double murder had the mother bird happened upon the scene when he shot her orange-and-black mate.
These two slayers, who carried shotguns loaded with "mustard-seed" shot, went out after the beautiful birds, because from Chicago and New York had come into their country certain men who represented great millinery furnishing houses, and these men had left word with local dealers in the country towns that they would pay money for the beautiful feathers of bluebirds and orioles and other birds. The little local dealers were promised a profit on all such spoils sent by them to the great city dealers, and they had set the men with the shotguns at work. Mating time and nesting time are the times for murdering birds, because at that season not only is their plumage finest, but the birds are more easily to be found and killed. It is then that they sing their clearest and strongest notes of joy; then, that they hover constantly near their nests; and it is very easy to stop their music.
So there remained in the nest in the maple stump four little helpless orphan bluebirds, and in the swaying nest in the elm-tree over the brook were four young orioles with only the mother bird to care for them. The widowed oriole fluttered about and beat her wings against the bushes in vain search for her lost love—for birds love as madly, and, I have sometimes thought, more faithfully than do human beings. But her children clamored, and the oriole had the mother instinct as well as the faithful love in her, and so she went to work for them. She didn't know how to get food for them very well at first, for bird wives and husbands have in some ways the same relations that we human beings have when we are wives and husbands. The male oriole, who had been learning where the insects and worms are, where whatever is good for little birds is, all through the time while the female bird is sitting on the nest, must necessarily know much more than his wife as to where things to eat for the children may be found nearest and most easily and swiftly. That is the great lesson the male bird learns while the female is sitting on the eggs and maturing into life the new creatures whose birth and being shall make this little loving couple happy in the way the good God has designated one form of happiness shall come to His creatures, be they with or without feathers.
The forlorn mother did as best she could. She fluttered through brakes and bushes seeking food for her young, but her children did not thrive very well. She worked so hard for them—human mothers and bird mothers are very much alike in this way—that she became thin and weak, and with each day that passed she brought less food to the little ones in the wonderfully constructed nest which she and her husband had made in the spring, when the smell of the liverworts was in the air, and muskrats swam together and made love to each other in the creek below. She sometimes, in the midst of her trouble (the trouble which came because my sweet woman, must have a bird's feather in her hat) would think of that springtime homemaking, and then this poor little widow would give a little bird gasp. That was all. One day she had searched hard for food for her young, for as they grew bigger they demanded more and were more arrogantly hungry. As she perched to rest a moment upon a twig, beneath which in the grass were a few late dandelions, she felt coming over her a weakness she could not resist. As a matter of fact, the bird mother had been overworked and so killed. Birds, overpressed, die as human beings do. So the mother bird, after a few moments, fell off the twig upon which she had paused for rest, and lay, a pretty little dead thing down in the grass among the dandelions. Then, of course, her children gasped and writhed and clamored in the nest, and at last, almost together, died of starvation.
Days and days before this the history of the bluebird family had ended. The four little bluebirds, being merely helpless young birds, lone and hungry, did nothing for a few hours after their bereavement but call for food, as was a habit of theirs. But nothing came to them—neither their father nor their mother came. They didn't know much except to be hungry, these little bluebirds. They couldn't know much, of course, as young as they were, and being but bird things with stomachs, they just wanted something to eat. They did not even know that if they did not get the food they wanted so much the ants would come and the other creatures of nature, and eat them. But they cried aloud, and more and more faintly, and at last were still. And the ants came. They found four little things with blue feathers just sprouting upon them, particularly upon the wings, where the growth seemed strongest and bluest, but the four little things were dead. It was all delightful for the ants and the other small things; all good in their way, who came seeking food. The very young birds, which had died gasping, that a woman might wear bright feathers in her hat, were fine eating for the ants.