HUMMINGBIRDS 



steadily on, always on a higher balanced line, 

 showing no great rise or fall. 



With squealing chirps and almost clicking song, 

 with darts on high, and swooping rush of whistling 

 wings, the male ruby -throat woos and wins. The 

 female perches near, with no keen appraising eye 

 or coy pretense, but, what is no less romantic, a 

 sublime relaxing to the effects of pattern, color, 

 sound and movement, until she accepts this blazing 

 acrobat as mate. 



The nest is begun at once, and the eggs deposited 

 often while it is yet a mere saucer of yellow down. 

 With the laying of the second egg — an oblong, 

 alabaster pea — the male is banished. Our human 

 judgment cries shame at the apparent unfairness 

 — the male's part a summer's holiday of courtship 

 and a moment's mating, and all responsibility for 

 the continuance of the race of hummingbirds slips 

 from him. The rest, for him, is solitary flights and 

 feeding, and at the first crisp day of mid-October, 

 to whir back to the tropics again. 



The female has to watch and approve his useless 

 antics, to accept him and dismiss him; then put 

 her whole little soul into the gathering of down 

 from fern and tree, and reel up yard upon yard of 

 stout cobweb cable, with which to bind it fast 

 to a twig or leaf. For spiders are to humming- 

 birds as coco-palms to savage islands — food and 

 wherewithal for shelter. It is not sufiicient that 

 the nest be thick and firm, and fast bound to the 

 twig, but it must be safe from every prying eye. 



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