POKING AROUND FOR BIRDS' NESTS 137 



ceeded, you have done better than I have. It cer- 

 tainly requires patience and the eyesight of an 

 Indian, two virtues I do not possess. Walter King 

 Stone, who has done it (he showed me one of the 

 nests by way of proof), says you must employ the 

 methods of wild-bee hunters, and by a series of 

 observations of the bird as it leaves its flower feed- 

 ing-ground you may ultimately reach its home. 

 The nest is a beautiful bit of bird architecture, 

 saddled on a limb, and plastered outside with gray 

 lichen to color it protectively. This lichen seems to 

 be fastened on with fiber from caterpillar cocoons, 

 and the inside (little larger than a big thimble) is 

 soft and woolly. Only two eggs are laid. The new 

 birds are more like naked bugs of some sort than 

 birds. I had a chance once to watch a nest of them 

 when I was a boy, for the parents built in a syringa- 

 bush directly under a window in our house near 

 Boston. There was a honey suckle -vine close by, 

 and all summer the flash and hum of the pretty 

 creatures made the veranda more delightful. 



In my boyhood, too, the Baltimore orioles, who 

 hang their wonderfully clever, pendent gray nests 

 like platinum eardrops from the very ends of 

 branches, used to favor especially the elm-trees over 

 the village streets. I would see a dozen of them in 

 process of building on my way to school late in 

 May, and often we put out strings or fine strips of 

 cotton for the birds to use. But, though I live 

 now in a town famous for its elms, I do not see 

 many nests hanging over the highway. The birds 

 seem to have retired from their favorite trees, and 

 now select the orchard to build in, or at any rate 



