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Bredimaster Directory 01
Page 05
On the evening of October 7th, Benedicto, who was a great glutton, prepared a huge bowl of the _mamao_ fruit stewed and sweetened with quantities of sugar. I had obtained from Albuquerque some tins of shrimps, lobster and salmon, butter and jam--all condemned stuff from some ship--and I gave all my men a feast. Benedicto brought me some of the sweet he had prepared, and it looked so tempting that, ill as I was, I ate a quantity of it. After dinner I persuaded my men to go back to the forest to recover the baggage they had abandoned there. Tempted by a present of money I offered them if they would bring it back safely, they all agreed to go.
In the trees that line one of the main streets and fashionable drives leading out of Washington city, and less than half a mile from the boundary, I have counted the nests of five different species at one time, and that without any very close scrutiny of the foliage, while in many acres of woodland, half a mile off, I searched in vain for a single nest. Among the five that interested me most was that of a blue grossbeak. Here this bird, which, according to Audubon's observations, in Louisiana is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand. The nest was composed mainly of fragments of newspaper and stalks of grass, and, though so low, was remarkably well concealed by one of the peculiar clusters of twigs and leaves which characterize this tree. The nest contained young when I discovered it, and though the parent birds were much annoyed by my loitering about beneath the tree, they paid little attention to the stream of vehicles that was constantly passing. It is a wonder to me when the birds could have built it, for they are much shyer when building than at other times. No doubt they worked mostly in the morning, having the early hours all to themselves.
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