All animal life is wonderful and much of it is beautiful, but it seems to me there can be nothing prettier or more subtle in all the immense accumulation of the folk lore of human courtship and marriage than the following practice of a certain Mexican bird.

He belongs to a rarely beautiful species of the Paradise family.

To shield the privacy of his wooing and wedding he builds a dainty little cone-shaped hut, about which he contrives a marvelous little landscape garden.

First he makes a sward of green moss and beds and parterres of crimson berries, tiny bright flowers and gold and silver sand and grains. Here and there he puts a pearly pebble or tiny pink shell. And so long as his love making lasts he drags away and replaces each flower as it fades, keeping the little Eden tidy, gay and sweet for his tiny love.

This sounds like fiction, but is scientific fact.

Louise Jamison.