46 American Birds 



beauty of this bird should not survive, we have two other 

 grosbeaks, the rose-breasted of the eastern states and the 

 black-headed of the West, both alike in character and in 

 habits. 



The black-headed grosbeak is one of the birds of my 

 childhood. As long ago as I can remember, I watched 

 for him in the mulberry trees and about the elderberry 

 bushes when the fruit was ripe. I could tell him from the 

 other birds by his high-keyed call-note long before I knew 

 his name. One day when I stopped to look for a bird that 

 was carolling in one of the maples along the creek, I saw 

 the grosbeak mother singing her lullaby, as she sat on 

 her eggs. It looked to me so like a human mother's love. 

 Few, if any other birds, sing in the home; perhaps they 

 often long to but are afraid. As John Burroughs says, it 

 is a very rare occurrence for a bird to sing on its nest, 

 but several times I have heard the grosbeak do it. How 

 it came to be a custom of the grosbeak I do not know, for 

 birds are, in general, very shy about appearing near the 

 nest or attracting attention to it. 



Last year I found three spotted eggs in a nest loosely 

 built among the leaves of the dogwood limbs. When I 

 had seen the father carrying a stick in his mouth, he 

 dropped it and looked as uneasy as a boy who had just 

 been caught with his pockets full of stolen apples. This 

 year the nest was twenty feet down the hill from the old 

 home. They came nearer the ground and placed the thin 

 framework of their nest between the two upright forks 

 of an arrow-wood bush. We had never bothered them 

 very much with the camera, but when they put their home 

 right down within four and a half feet of the ground, it 



