394 The Red-eyed Vireo 



No wonder, therefore, the young bird-student soon makes its ac- 

 quaintance. Even as I write these lines, on a hot afternoon late in June, 

 I can hear the notes of a Vireo coming in through the open window. The 

 bird is out there among the trees of a vacant lot, where the small boys 

 have dug their trenches and are sending forth their volleys of vocal 

 musketry. The savage shouts of youth and the song of the Vireo have 

 been going on together now for some weeks, and the authors of all the 

 din apparently have never noticed each other. 



The past four years a pair of Vireos has spent the summer in the 

 trees of this vacant lot. One June day I found the nest near the outer 

 end of a white birch limb. The nest could easily be 

 . T es reached by a grown person standing on the ground 



beneath. It was a beautiful cradle hung in the 

 fork of two twigs, and was made mainly of strips of bark and plant 

 fibre. A piece of white string and some scraps of paper decorated the 

 outer sides. It contained four white eggs lightly spotted around the 

 larger end. From these there emerged in time four little birds that for 

 many days engrossed their mother's attention. After they had flown 

 away I took the nest and placed it on the wall of my study. The next 

 Spring, while passing near the place with a little friend of mine, I went 

 over to the limb and showed her the place from which I had cut the twig 

 to take the nest. Just as I took it in my fingers I was surprised and 

 delighted to find a new Vireo nest not more than twelve inches from 

 where the other had been and in it sat the mother bird. In due time this 

 nest also was removed to the study. 



The past year I could not find the nest, although the birds were about 

 and the male was heard singing every day. When Autumn came, how- 

 ever, and the leaves had fallen, the nest was discovered in another tree 

 a few yards away at a height of at least twenty feet from the ground. 

 Only yesterday I learned that for the fourth time a Vireo's nest has been 

 found in the vacant lot. One of the boys discovered it suspended from a 

 swinging limb just over a path along which commuters hurry every 

 morning fof trains. So I went out to look, and found that it held one 

 vigorous young bird that cried most outrageously when I pulled the limb 

 down a few inches in order to remove a dead one whose head hung over 

 the edge. 



One of the questions which naturally arise in connection with this 

 record of nests, is whether they were all built by the same pair of birds. 

 It would seem that such was probably the case, although there is no pos- 

 sible way of knowing. 



In a few weeks now the Vireos will be gone and for more than eight 

 months we shall hear no more of them. Travelling southward chiefly by 



