70 Ways of Wood Folk. 



and grasp them, should he perchance venture near 

 the house and hover an instant over the nest. 



Besides all this, the oriole is a neighborly little 

 body ; and that helps her. Though the young are 

 kept from harm anywhere by the cunning instinct 

 which builds a hanging nest, she still prefers to build 

 near the house, where hawks and crows and owls 

 rarely come. She knows her friends and takes advan- 

 tage of their protection, returning year after year 

 to the same old elm, and, like a thrifty little house- 

 wife, carefully saving and sorting the good threads of 

 her storm-wrecked old house to be used in buildinp; 

 the new. 



Of late years, however, it has seemed to me that 

 the pretty nests on the secluded streets of New Eng- 

 land towns are growing scarcer. The orioles are 

 peace-loving birds, and dislike the society of those 

 noisy, pugnacious little rascals, the English sparrows, 

 which have of late taken possession of our streets. 

 Often now I find the nests far away from any house, 

 on lonely roads where a few years ago they were 

 rarely seen. Sometimes also a solitary farmhouse, 

 too far from the town to be much visited by spar- 

 rows, has two or three nests swinging about it in 

 its old elms, where formerly there was but one. 



It is an interesting evidence of the bird's keen 

 instinct that where nests are built on lonely roads 



