material. Where the
lives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always a
danger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, but
they pay a tax to fate in others.

The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material in
the body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they
apparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven together
and quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm,
feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made of
something that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard and
brittle for hair.

Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep and
pocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no such
elaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort of
dried grass, very elaborately woven together.

Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long,
strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one I
have seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves.

I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the
hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and
symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
substance. Of course, the phoebe's artistic masonry under the shelving
rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry
grass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reach
of four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happy
thought.

The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the
indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own.

About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social
sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the
tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the
tossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest is
over, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees.
She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to the
low bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to the
branches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her material
loosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. She
seems pathetically igno