394 
The Red-eyed Vireo 
No wonder, therefore, the young bird-student soon makes its ac- 
quaintance. Even as I write these lines, on a hot afternoon late in June, 
I can hear the notes of a Vireo coming in through the open window. The 
bird is out there among the trees of a vacant lot, where the small boys 
have dug their trenches and are sending forth their volleys of vocal 
musketry. The savage shouts of youth and the song of the Vireo have 
been going on together now for some weeks, and the authors of all the 
din apparently have never noticed each other. 
The past four years a pair of Vireos has spent the summer in the 
trees of this vacant lot. One June day I found the nest near the outer 
end of a white birch limb. The nest could easily be 
reached by a grown person standing on the ground 
beneath. It was a beautiful cradle hung in the 
fork of two twigs, and was made mainly of strips of bark and plant 
fibre. A piece of white string and some scraps of paper decorated the 
outer sides. It contained four white eggs lightly spotted around the 
larger end. From these there emerged in time four little birds that for 
many days engrossed their mother’s attention. After they had flown 
away I took the nest and placed it on the wall of my study. The next 
Spring, while passing near the place with a little friend of mine, I went 
over to the limb and showed her the place from which I had cut the twig 
to take the nest. Just as I took it in my fingers I was surprised and 
delighted to find a new Vireo nest not more than twelve inches from 
The Nest 
in the Lot 
where the other had been and in it sat the mother bird. In due time this 
nest also was removed to the study. 
The past year I could not find the nest, although the birds were about | 
and the male was heard singing every day. When Autumn came, how- ! 
ever, and the leaves had fallen, the nest was discovered in another tree : 
a few yards away at a height of at least twenty feet from the ground. ! 
Only yesterday I learned that for the fourth time a Vireo’s nest has been 
found in the vacant lot. One of the boys discovered it suspended from a 
swinging limb just over a path along which commuters hurry every 
morning foi" trains. So I went out to look, and found that it held one 
vigorous young bird that cried most outrageously when I pulled the limb 
down a few inches in order to remove a dead one whose head hung over 
the edge. 
One of the questions which naturally arise in connection with this 
record of nests, is whether they were all built by the same pair of birds. 
It would seem that such was probably the case, although there is no pos- 
sible way of knowing. 
In a few weeks now the Vireos will be gone and for more than eight 
months we shall hear no more of them. Travelling southward chiefly by 
