FOUR NEIGHBORS DIVERSE 



The female Scarlet Tanager is not a scarlet tanager 

 at all, but a dull greenish-olive one, and very few people 

 would suspect her relationship to her brilliant husband. 

 Indeed, she generally comes into publicity, if at all, as 

 it were in his reflected light. First we see the male, 

 about the most conspicuous object in the woodland 

 landscape, and then, looking about very sharply for 

 his companion, we finally make out her demure and 

 inconspicuous form among the foliage. It is well that 

 she is not as conspicuous as her husband, for every 

 marauder would discover the nest, and presently there 

 might be no more Scarlet Tanagers. 



The nest is generally built in the woods out toward 

 the end of some horizontal branch, often in an oak, and 

 as high as twenty feet from the ground. But I have 

 also found them in saplings no higher than one's head, 

 in pastures close to the edge of the woods, in wild 

 apple trees or abandoned orchards grown to scrub. 

 In one spot of this latter sort I recently found three old 

 nests, in early June, and saw the pair of tanagers 

 loitering about, but could not trace them to their new 

 home. 



There is another decadent orchard spot near my 

 home, on a hillside, by the edge of woods, all grown up 

 to briers and scrub. The season before the one just 

 mentioned, on the twenty-fifth of May, I noted a new 

 but uncompleted nest on an extending branch of an 

 apple tree. No bird was about, and I was uncertain 

 to what species it belonged — either Rose-breasted 



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