76 Birds of Lakeside and Prairie 



his head. I saw a brilliant Baltimore oriole sunning himself 

 on a limb and holding in his bill a piece of newspaper as large 

 as himself. I never knew an oriole to use newspaper for 

 nesting material, and although it was homesteading time I 

 did not think that the bird seriously contemplated playing 

 the vireo and using wall-paper in his residence. There was 

 a red-headed woodpecker on the trunk of the tree. He 

 seemed to take something more than passing interest in the 

 oriole and his bit of paper. Perhaps his thought was, "There's 

 a foolish bird laboring with something that it has no possible 

 use for. ' ' Whatever the thought, the red-head presently darted 

 out, snatched the bit of paper from the oriole, and flew far 

 across the field with it to another tree. There he dropped the 

 paper to the ground and began a search for grubs in the bark. 

 The woodpecker had no more use for the paper than did the 

 oriole. Perhaps its purloining of the paper was prompted 

 simply by a bad temper. It has often been intimated that 

 infirmities of temper are not infrequently the accompaniments 

 of red heads. 



One night in late April a brilliant male scarlet tanager flew 

 through the open door into a cigar store situated on one of 

 the busiest corners in the city of Chicago. The bird took a 

 perch on top of one of the wall cases and proceeded to make 

 himself perfectly at home. It is a curious fact that not one of 

 the scores of people who visited the cigar store during the 

 next twenty-four hours was able to give the bird its proper 

 name. It was the belief of all that some rare bird, originally 

 from the tropics, had escaped from its cage. The scarlet 

 tanagers are abundant birds in the Chicago suburbs, and the 

 fact that no one knew the songster is a sufficient commentary 

 on the lack of the observing power of the mass of people. The 



