OF VIRGINIA 207 
houses and orchards are selected for a nesting site. The 
male is a good songster while nest building is going on 
and during incubation. The female does all the nest 
building, the male following her back and forth as she 
procures material. Green grasses are used for the con- 
struction of the nest, which are woven into a beautiful, 
finely and strongly made structure or cup-shaped basket, 
lined with plant down and suspended from a crotch or 
supported by an upright crotch of limb. With the color 
of the material used in the nest, and their habit of placing 
it so as to be well concealed by surrounding green leaves, 
it is not one of the easiest nests to find; watching the 
flight of the parent birds is advisable. Only one instance 
do I know of where these birds resorted to a pine tree. 
This happened on my farm in 1910, the nest placed in a 
small young pine’s topmost upright forks, about 20 feet 
up. The eggs are three to five in number, bluish-white, 
spotted, blotched, and slightly streaked with brown and 
lavender. Size, .80x.55. Two and sometimes three 
broods are raised a season. There is no doubt but what 
they do some damage to berries, grapes and sometimes 
fruit, but the amount of good they do around the place far 
overbalances the harm done. One year when my vine- 
yard was small, I found that four young orioles reached 
the flying age just before my grapes ripened, and these, 
with the two old birds, damaged many handsome bunches 
of grapes by picking spots out of a few berries of each 
bunch, thus ruining their marketable qualities. The 
following season I experimented with this same pair of 
birds, which nested each year in a dogwood tree on my 
front lawn. The first set of eggs, four in number, May 
20th, I took, and by the time they had layed, hatched and 
reared their second setting, my grapes were marketed. 
