Its color
approaches to ultramarine, while it has a sash of chestnut-red across
its shoulders,--all the effects, I suspect, of that wonderful air and
sky of California, and of those great Western plains; or, if one goes
a little higher up into the mountainous regions of the West, he finds
the Arctic bluebird, the ruddy brown on the breast changed to a
greenish blue, and the wings longer and more pointed; in other
respects not differing much from our species.
The bluebird usually builds its nest in a hole in a stump or stub, or
in an old cavity excavated by a woodpecker, when such can be had; but
its first impulse seems to be to start in the world in much more
style, and the happy pair make a great show of house-hunting about the
farm buildings, now half persuaded to appropriate a dove-cote, then
discussing in a lively manner a last year's swallow nest, or
proclaiming with much flourish and flutter that they have taken the
wren's house, or the tenement of the purple martin; till finally
nature becomes too urgent, when all this pretty make-believe ceases,
and most of them settle back upon the old family stumps and knotholes
in remote fields, and go to work in earnest.
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