Vermont Bird Club • 27 



form parks, while flourishing and extensive orange and grape fruit 

 orchards lend on every hand their vivid beauty to the landscape. What 

 wonder that the birds find here ideal conditions. 



Of our Northern birds, blue jays are easily the most numerous 

 and there exhibit their wonderful skill in mimicry to a degree not 

 thought of in the North. They mock the mocking birds till even they 

 are puzzled, give the identical call notes of the shrike and sparrow 

 hawk, besides possessing original notes and songs that produce varying 

 degrees of pleasure and pain to the listener. Next in point of num- 

 bers is the red-headed woodpecker — a bird so beautiful as to always 

 give a thrill of delight — and yet there so common as to evoke no sur- 

 prise. They spend much of their time working on the big pines where, 

 also, they excavate their nests, one of which I discovered on April 

 4th with four young birds in it. My attention was attracted to it by 

 the soft, quirring notes of one of the parent birds as he hung outside 

 the hole and looked adoringly within. The hole was not over seven 

 feet from the ground; the excavation for the nest was, probably, a foot 

 and a half in depth. 



Flickers, meadow larks, rusty and red-winged blackbirds, grackles, 

 brown thrashers, song and swamp sparrows, solitary vireos, phoebes, 

 robins, hawks, ducks, herons, sandpipers, snipes, kinglets and warblers 

 are commonly seen, each in the environment to which it is adapted. 



Characteristically Southern are the mocking birds and cardinals, 

 and no matter how often seen and heard possess a charm ever new 

 and fascinating. The mocking birds begin to sing in February, and 

 by the last of April are in glorious song. On April 28th I found one 

 of their nests with four eggs in it. Loggerhead shrikes that had built 

 near the lake on a scraggy stump were feeding their young at this date. 

 The cardinal's first whistle I heard on March 20th — on April 24th the 

 pair that lived in our garden were building their nest in a nearby 

 orange tree. 



Of striking beauty among Southern birds is the red-bellied wood- 

 pecker (a name with little significance to the casual observer, since 

 the red of the under parts is so faint as to almost escape notice). It is 

 the brilliant, flame-colored head and neck contrasted with the shining 

 black and white bars of the back that make it so noticeable. The 

 Southern hairy woodpecker has a call that sounds like a weird laugh 

 and so arouses the curiosity of the hearer that this is one of the first 

 birds to be hunted out and identified. In size it is intermediate be- 



