One listens in vain for a song; only a lisping "Twee-twee-ze," or "a dreary
whisper," as Minot calls their low-toned communications with each other,
reaches our ears from their high perches in the cedar trees, where they sit,
almost motionless hours at a time, digesting the enormous quantities of
juniper and whortleberries, wild cherries, worms, and insects upon which they
have gormandized.
Nuttall gives the cedar birds credit for excessive politeness to each other.
He says he has often seen them passing a worm from one to another down a whole
row of beaks and back again before it was finally eaten.
When nesting time arrives -- that is to say, towards the end of the summer --
they give up their gregarious habits and live in pairs, billing and kissing
like turtle-doves in the orchard or wild crabtrees, where a flat, bulky nest
is rather carelessly built of twigs, grasses, feathers, strings -- any odds
and ends that may be lying about. The eggs are usually four, white tinged with
purple and spotted with black.
Apparently they have no moulting season; their plumage is always the same,
beautifully neat and full-feathered. Nothing ever hurries or flusters them,
their greatest concern apparently being, when they alight, to settle
themselves comfortably between their over-polite friends, who are never guilty
of jolting or crowding.
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