BIRD COURTSHIP 265 



thrushes, and doves. Their gaudy colouring seems 

 to beget reckless spirits and they go about their 

 courting with an abandon never seen in the shy, 

 slipping creatures of deep wood. 



Moreover, they love to display their "coats of 

 many colours." Who ever saw one of these 

 brightly plumaged birds select a deep, lonely, 

 secluded place for a residence? They flaunt them- 

 selves in the open, come near houses and the affairs 

 of human life, and exhibit nerve and boldness 

 wholly lacking in the sombre, deep forest dwellers. 

 Remember the goldfinch piping on your lettuce 

 heads and sunflowers. The indigo bluebird has 

 built along the public highway and preempted 

 the telephone wires for a choir loft, until as a bird 

 of the wire he rivals the swallow — in confidence 

 in humanity, not in numbers. The fences belong 

 to the lark. From every stake and rider, high 

 post carrying rod-lines, or dead stump, he rolls his 

 song up to Heaven. 



The cardinal grosbeak is a bird of the bushes, 

 but nine tenths of the time his bush is beside the 

 road or river. In many instances he locates in 

 orchards and even in grape arbours; and once in 

 my childhood a pair nested on a flat cedar limb 

 not ten feet from our front door. It would seem 

 if there were exclusively "instinctive" action on 

 the part of a bird it would cause this, the brightest 

 of all our songsters, to seek deep wood and seclu- 

 sion, for every flash of his brilliant body in a con- 



