THE CARDINAL GROSBEAK 



I wanted for my series. You should have seen her shining face 

 when I told her so. 



The nest was four feet from the ground, not far from the 

 Wood Robin's location, on a brush heap overgrown and covered 

 in a thick mat with wild roses, grape-vines and blackberry bushes. 

 The roses were in full bloom, while their delicate blossoms were 

 close over and around the brooding mother. The nest was a 

 little firmer than the usual Cardinal construction, typical of the 

 best building, the lining of dried grass thickly woven and 

 cuppy, the four blue-\vhite eggs mizzled and mottled all over 

 with brownish and dark lavender specks, no two of them exactly 

 the same colour, and one egg, undoubtedly the first, quite 

 perceptibly larger than the others. That told the story of a 

 young bird in her first brooding, where, as a pullet sometimes does, 

 she had surpassed herself with her first egg. With the securing 

 of that nest my series was complete, for I had sufficient material 

 for every other illustration needed. Studies of more or less 

 value had been made around almost every one of the nests lo- 

 cated by others or myself. 



I chose for the hero of my story a male Cardinal, undoubtedly 

 a stray in Indiana, for he certainly was the big brilliant "redbird " 

 of Kansas and Iowa. I could not carry him through the illus- 

 tration half a dozen different Cardinals had to be reproduced 

 for that but I photographed him several times alone, so that he 

 dominated the work, while the others used did not appear so un- 

 like him as to attract the attention of anyone reading for 

 the story. 



As described in the book, this bird really was "the biggest, 

 reddest Redbird" ever seen in that locality. His home, in a 

 thicket of sumac, on the bank of the Wabash River, was on the 

 Brown farm northeast of the village of Ceylon. Cultivated 

 fields came to the bank, enclosed by an old snake-fence; a few feet 



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