The Baltimore oriole is one of our birds that eat the cotton boll weevil, as well as the larvae of the click beetle, plant and wood lice, spiders, wasps and grasshoppers. It nests in eastern North America and spends the winter in Mexico, Central America and in northern South America. No greater thrill can be in store as you stroll along a quiet brush bordered roadway than to glimpse that masquerader, the illusive yellow-throat, as he darts in and out among the leafy branches, uttering his sharp call note. The song, in spite of its individual variation, has always the same accents, and cannot be mistaken wherever heard, east or west.

His bulky nest is placed near the ground in the heart of a grass tussock or a briar bush. The three to five brown-speckled, white eggs may, sometimes, be accompanied by an extra egg, a trifle larger than the others, placed there by the cowbird, which thus shirks her family responsibilities. Year after year Jenny Wren returns to the house of her choice, be it a bird box in the apple tree, a cranny in the wall, or the pocket of the perennial scarecrow. Spring house-cleaning over, she and her mate proceed to fill all available space with twigs. Somewhere within they place a lining of soft grasses, webs and feathers. Here six to eight profusely freckled eggs are laid. While Jenny is incubating, her mate perches near by, untiringly warbling his sweet song.

After the young are hatched there is little rest for either of them. Caterpillars, beetles, hugs and spiders must he supplied in astonishing numbers all the time, until the youthful wrens are ready to help in the hunt. When the wren families seek their winter homes in the South there are more wrens than houses, and they become known as wood wrens because they have to find shelter in the forests.

The orchard oriole, sometimes called basket bird, is found in eastern North America, over the central plains, south to the Gulf and throughout Mexico. In late May it fastens its feather-lined, semi-pensile nest of green grass near the end of an orchard tree limb, in the tangled growth by stream or upland. The nest is almost invisible until the grass dries and it becomes conspicuous at the most inopportune time when there are helpless young.

However, the tribe is of sufficient numbers to be useful to the agriculturist as a destroyer of injurious insects and their larvae, especially those affecting fruit trees during nesting time.