Home › Volumes › Bird Homes › Semi-pensile, Pensile or Hanging Nests
Baltimore Oriole
Adult male--Head, throat, and upper part of back black; breast, belly, and rump brilliant orange, sometimes reddish orange; wings black with white bar; outer tail feathers orange with black base; middle tail feathers black to the tips.
Adult female--Greenish or grayish orange in general appearance; head, back, and sometimes the throat slightly mottled with black; breast lighter grayish orange. Length--7.53.
The young resemble the adult but have no black mottling.
Breeding Range--From the Gulf States northward.
The nest is so peculiar that it cannot be mistaken. It is pensile or hanging, about six or seven inches deep, and is built of fine grasses, plant fibres, downy seeds, wool, cotton string, hairs, and sometimes strips of cloth; these are woven together so as to form a perfect bag, the sides of which are very thin. The inside is lined with fine grass, hair, and wool. The nest is securely laced to small twigs, usually at the end of a branch. From 4 to 6 eggs are laid. They are very pale gray, drab, or almost white, with a few strange cabalistic scroll-like lines and blotches of a dark purplish brown; some of these lines are so light in colour that they are scarcely perceptible. Size--.92 x .62. See Fig. 10, Plate C.
Although the Baltimore Oriole's nest is so easy to find, being generally placed far from the ground, at the extreme end of an overhanging branch of an elm tree, it is difficult to see whether it contains eggs or young. Two nests are sometimes found in a single tree. The elm seems to be preferred to all others, although frequently the black-walnut, maple, apple, weeping-willow, or almost any other tree may be selected. The most likely place to find the nest is in the large trees along the roadside, near houses.
The young may be reared without much difficulty, and I know of few other birds that better repay the trouble of bringing up; they are thoroughly sociable, and are a constant source of amusement and interest; seldom quiet, they delight in finding pieces of thread or string, which they weave and unweave in a truly wonderful manner. (I have some reason to think that the male birds do not weave.) They become so tame that even when allowed to fly out of doors they will return to their cage.
The nesting season begins about the third week in May.