FOUR NEIGHBORS DIVERSE 



sometimes nests as far south as southern New England 

 and in the Alleghany Mountains. 



I have been fortunate enough to find one nest. As 

 I was passing along the edge of a pine grove one June 

 seventeenth, I noticed a vireo's nest in the fork of an 

 extended branch of a sapling, not quite as high as my 

 head. The owner, a Solitary Vireo, was at home, and 

 was surprisingly tame. Though I stood close to her, 

 she did not move, and it was only when I almost put my 

 hand on her that she hopped off and began to scold 

 very angrily. There were four small young in the nest. 

 Unfortunately this was before the days of bird photog- 

 raphy, in my boyhood, when the portrait photographer 

 fixed one's head in a vise and made one sit rigid for a 

 fearfully long time. I am certain that the vireo would 

 not have submitted to that. 



Last summer I came pretty near finding another nest 

 of this bird. A friend and I had been exploring a 

 typical Northern sphagnum swamp, around which grew 

 a tract of black spruce, making ideal conditions for 

 tempting Northern birds to linger south of their usual 

 range. It was getting toward evening, and we were 

 just coming out of the woods when we heard a vireo 

 singing away with all its might from a pine tree near by. 

 "That song doesn't sound to me just like the common 

 Red-eye," said my friend. "It certainly does sound a 

 little peculiar," I replied, "let's look it up." The pine 

 was a large one, and for a quarter of an hour we vainly 

 craned our necks, while the bird sang on. Finally my 

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