Oriole--Eastern.

(One half natural size.)]

When in the hammock under the oak one day, I saw a pair of the
odd-looking Arizona hooded orioles busily going and coming to a drooping
branch on the edge of the tree. They had a great deal to talk about as
they went and came, and when they had gone I found, to my great
satisfaction, that they had begun a nest. They often use the gray
Spanish moss, but here had found a good substitute in the orange-colored
parasitic vine of the meadows known among the people of the valley as
the 'love-vine' (dodder). The whole pocket was composed of it, making a
very gaudy nest.

Linnets nested in the same old tree. Indeed, it is hard to say where
these pretty rosy house finches, cousins of our purple finches, would
not take it into their heads to build. They nested over the front door,
in the vines over the windows, in the oaks and about the outbuildings,
and their happy musical songs rang around the ranch-house from morning
till night. As I listened to their merry roundelay day after day during
that beautiful California spring, it sounded to me as though they said,
"_How-pretty-it-is'-out, how-pretty-it-is'-out, how-pretty-it-is'!_" The
linnets are ardent little wooers, singing and dancing before the
indifferent birds they would win for their mates. I once saw a rosy
lover throw back his pretty head and hop about before his brown lady
till she was out of patience and turned her back on him. When that had
no effect, she opened her bill, spread her wings, and leaned toward him
as if saying, "If you don't stop your nonsense, I'll----" But the fond
linnets' gallantry and tenderness are not all spent in the wooing. When
the mother bird was brooding her nest over our front door, her
crimson-throated mate stood on the peak of the ridgepole above and sang
blithely to her, turning his head and looking down every little while to
make sure that she was listening to his pretty prattle.

One of the birds that nested in the trees by the ranch-house was the
bee-bird, who was soft gray above and delicate yellow below, instead of
dark gray above and shining white below, like his eastern relative, the
kingbird. The birds used to perch on the bare oak limbs, flycatching. It
was interesting to watch them. They would fly obliquely into the air and
then turn, with bills bristling with insects, and sail down on
outstretched wings, their square tails set so that the white outer
feathers showed to as good advan