BALTIMORE ORIOLE

Eggs- After courting and mating the female oriole lays between four to six white eggs. The outer shell looks as someone drew pen lines and scrawls. Also the eggs have dark brown and black spots.

Migration and winter range- The bird usually winters from southern Mexico to Colombia and Venezuela, and sometimes in Cuba. They start their southern migration around the first week in September.

Food- The birds spend much of their time in the thick leafy sections of shade trees, collecting insects from the leaves and twigs. Caterpillars are an important food source, usually making up over 33 percent of the total diet. The bird has destroyed a harmful local swarm of orchard tent caterpillars. Moths, beetles, ants, bugs, scale insects, aphids and wood borers are among other insects on their menu. They will eat also wild fruits, garden peas and flower nectar. Nectar feeders and oranges cut in half attract orioles to your back yard bird feeders. Farmers who grow cotton find the Baltimore Oriole a friend because of its love for the boll weevil. About the time they make their annual flight the boll weevils start to appear and the orioles feasts on the weevils.

Many people have written wonderful words about the Baltimore Oriole. One poem by Edgar Fawcett goes like this.

How falls it, Oriole, thou hast come to fly In tropic splendor through our Northern sky?

At some glad moment was it nature's choice To dower a scrap of sunlight with a voice?

Or did an orange tulip, flaked with black In some forgotten garden ages back___

Yearning toward heaven until its wish was heard, Desire unspeakably to be a bird?

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