THE BUILDING OF THE NEST
Next comes the Catbird, with a twig lattice, and the Wren, with a feather-lined pile in the little house provided for her; or, lacking the house, she uses an old hat or boot leg, instead. The Thrasher chooses a stout bush, and tosses together a bunch of grape-vine bark, sedge grass, and strong tendrils, in a way to correspond with his bravura music. The Purple Finch sets his large, sparrow-like nest in a high bush; you must visit it often, for you will always hear good music close by.
The Flicker utilizes a soft place in the swamp maple, boring his nest hole with great accuracy; the Yellow Warbler and Hummingbird strip the soft wool that wrapped the big, juicy Osmunda ferns in their winter sleep. The Warbler mixes the fernwool with cobwebs and milkweed flax, taking it to the apple tree; while the Hummingbird bears his load to a mossed cedar branch, and rounds a two-inch nest, blending it with the branch until it looks merely as if lichens had encrusted a raised knot hole. Next you will admire the work of the weavers, — the Orioles and Vireos. The darned basket of the Orchard Oriole is, perhaps, set in the strawberry-apple tree, as if to catch its early fruit; he makes his beak point his shuttle; as Coues says, antedating Elias Howe, who invented a needle with the eye at the point; and the Baltimore Oriole treads flax from old milkweed stalks, gathering his string far and near. The Baltimore Oriole builds too well to work quickly; and the pouch, sometimes eight inches deep, swings freely and firmly from its branch, so placed as to be safe from above and below.}}
The Vireos make a little pocket (like a stocking heel set between the knitting-needles) which is fastened firmly in the fork of a small branch. Woven into it are papers, scraps of hornets' nests, and flakes of decayed wood. The Solitary Vireo adds hair and fur to his, and the Red-eyed Vireo, the wings of moths and other insects, cocoons, and snake skins. It was in the nest of this Vireo, that Hamilton Gibson found twisted a bit of newspaper, whose single legible sentence read: ". . . .have in view the will of God."
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