was she saying? She was constantly filled with a desire to perch upon
the precise spot where he was sitting, and if he had not moved away I
think she would have alighted upon his back. Now and then, when she
flitted away from him, he followed her with like gestures and tones and
demonstrations of affection, but never with quite the same ardor. The
two pairs kept near each other, about the house, the bird-boxes, the
trees, the posts and vines in the vineyard, filling the ear with their
soft, insistent warbles, and the eye with their twinkling azure wings.

[Illustration: BLUEBIRD
Upper, male; lower, female]

Was it this constant presence of rivals on both sides that so stimulated
them and kept them up to such a pitch of courtship? Finally, after I had
watched them over an hour, the birds began to come into collision. As
they met in the vineyard, the two males clinched and fell to the
ground, lying there for a moment with wings sprawled out, like birds
brought down by a gun. Then they separated, and each returned to his
mate, warbling and twinkling his wings. Very soon the females clinched
and fell to the ground and fought savagely, rolling over and over each
other, clawing and tweaking and locking beaks and hanging on like bull
terriers. They did this repeatedly; once one of the males dashed in and
separated them, by giving one of the females a sharp tweak and blow.
Then the males were at it again, their blue plumage mixing with the
green grass and ruffled by the ruddy soil. What a soft, feathery,
ineffectual battle it seemed in both cases!--no sound, no blood, no
flying feathers, just a sudden mixing up and general disarray of blue
wings and tails and ruddy breasts, there on the ground; assault but no
visible wounds; thrust of beak and grip of claw, but no feather loosened
and but little ruffling; long holding of one down by the other, but no
cry of pain or fury. It was the kind of battle that one likes to
witness. The birds usually locked beaks, and held their grip half a
minute at a time. One of the females would always alight by the
struggling males and lift her wings and utter her soft notes, but what
she said--whether she was encouraging one of the blue coats or berating
the other, or imploring them both to desist, or egging them on--I could
not tell. So far as I could understand her speech, it was the same that
she had been uttering to her mate all the time.

When my bluebirds dashed at each other with beak a