Neither can the crow find a
resting place from which to steal the young; and the hawk's legs are
not long enough to reach down and grasp them, should he perchance
venture near the house and hover an instant over the nest.
Besides all this, the oriole is a neighborly little body; and that
helps her. Though the young are kept from harm anywhere by the cunning
instinct which builds a hanging nest, she still prefers to build near
the house, where hawks and crows and owls rarely come. She knows her
friends and takes advantage of their protection, returning year after
year to the same old elm, and, like a thrifty little housewife,
carefully saving and sorting the good threads of her storm-wrecked old
house to be used in building the new.
Of late years, however, it has seemed to me that the pretty nests on
the secluded streets of New England towns are growing scarcer. The
orioles are peace-loving birds, and dislike the society of those
noisy, pugnacious little rascals, the English sparrows, which have of
late taken possession of our streets. Often now I find the nests far
away from any house, on lonely roads where a few years ago they were
rarely seen. Sometimes also a solitary farmhouse, too far from the
town to be much visited by sparrows, has two or three nests swinging
about it in its old elms, where formerly there was but one.
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