No blackbird is shy, you may be sure. The orioles always fly about in plain sight, and talk freely of themselves and their affairs. A hot-headed, blustering little fellow is the oriole, noisy, restless, talkative; always whistling gaily like a happy school boy, in sun, wind and rain. He has scolding notes for meddlesome neighbors, too. The orchard oriole is a good policeman. When he sounds his harsh, alarm note: "Chack!" every bird in the neighborhood knows it is time to skurry to cover.

If the doctor hadn't had a cow, and a pasture lot for her with a pond in it, and low elder and hazel and briar bushes around it, he wouldn't have had some of the blackbirds nesting near him. A hedge of thorny, ruddy-flowered japonica was between the garden and the pasture. Often a gay flash of black and white, with a yellow patch on the back of the neck, tumbled up out of the meadow onto that hedge. It was the bobolink. He sang and swung and flirted his wings and tail. He chattered and gossiped and whistled. He just bubbled over with high spirits and innocent fun. Up and down the scale he sang, like a musical acrobat on a trapeze. But most of the time he just bubbled out his own saucy name.

"Bob-o-link! Bob-o-link! Spink, spank, spink!" Dear little rascal. He had no trouble at all in winning a wife!

In the cat-tails and rushes about the pond was always a colony of red-winged blackbirds. Glossy fellows the males were, in jetty coats with red, gold-bordered shoulder knots. They strutted and danced and jumped and whistled "Bob-o-lee!" or, as some bird lovers understand: "Con-quer-ee!" It can hardly be called singing, this explosive gurgle.

Meadowlark

But oh, the meadow larks that nested in that pasture! This little brown-backed, and spotted-yellow-breasted singer, with the necklace of jet and white-tipped tail, is the Jenny Lind of our grasslands. You cannot walk along the edge of a clover field but he may spring up at your feet, perch on a fence or bush, and pour out a melody like flutes and yiolins, and human voices in vesper hymns. Yet, so few notice the meadow lark that Audubon, our greatest bird student, called him neglecta

He is not a lark at all, as is the English sky-lark. He is a cousin of the blackbirds, the orioles and bobolinks. He walks like the blackbirds. He comes to us in April and sings all summer long, on the ground, on perches and on the wing. He is one of the very greatest of bird singers, rivalled only by the nightingale, the mocking bird, and the brown and hermit thrushes.

There was rivalry among the children as to who should first spy the tanager in the doctor's garden. A flash of scarlet flame across an open space, and the tanager is gone! This glowing coal of a bird with black velvet wings and tail, really belongs to a tropical family. He seems as strange among our wild birds as an orchid in a meadow. He flits about in silent places, singing a lovely little chant, as sad as the dove's but of varied melody. To his mate he sings a low sweet warble. He calls like a robin, and he "throws" his voice like a ven-tril-o-quist, so you will often think him somewhere else.