BIRDS CONSPICUOUSLY YELLOW AND 

 ORANGE 



Yellow-throated Vireo 



(yireoflavifrons) Vireo or Greenlet family 



Length—'y.^ to 6 inches. A little smaller than the English spar- 

 row. 



Male and Female — Lemon-yellow on throat, upper breast ; line 

 around the eye and forehead. Yellow, shading into olive- 

 green, on head, back, and shoulders. Underneath white. 

 Tail dark brownish, edged with white. Wings a lighter 

 shade, with two white bands across, and some quills edged 

 with white. 



Range — North America, from Newfoundland to Gulf of Mexico, 

 and westward to the Rockies. Winters in the tropics. 



Migrations — May. September. Spring and autumn migrant ; 

 more rarely resident. 



This is undoubtedly the beauty of the vireo family — a group 

 of neat, active, stoutly built, and vigorous little birds of yellow, 

 greenish, and white plumage; birds that love the trees, and 

 whose feathers reflect the coloring of the leaves they hide, hunt, 

 and nest among. "We have no birds," says Bradford Torrey, 

 "so unsparing of their music: they sing from morning till night." 



The yellow-throated vireo partakes of all the family charac- 

 teristics, but, in addition to these, it eclipses all its relatives in the 

 brilliancy of its coloring and in the art of nest-building, which it 

 has brought to a state of hopeless perfection. No envious bird 

 need try to excel the exquisite finish of its workmanship. Hap- 

 pily, it has wit enough to build its pensile nest high above the 

 reach of small boys, usually suspending it from a branch over- 

 hanging running water that threatens too precipitous a bath to 

 tempt the young climbers. 



However common in the city parks and suburban gardens 

 this bird may be during the migrations, it delights in a secluded 



189 



