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Books bp flr. Torrep,

EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies.
With twelve colored Illustrations repro-
duced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00.

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.

A RAMBLER'S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.

THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top,
$1.25.

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.

SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.
16mo, $1.25.

A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. 16mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
Boston anp New York.

BLUE JAY

a. Male, 2, 3. Females

EVERYDAY BIRDS

ELEMENTARY STUDIES

BY

BRADFORD TORREY

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN
COLORS AFTER AUDUBON, AND
TWO FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Che Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

Two Littte Kines

. THe CHICKADEE : , ‘ : A
. THE Brown CREEPER

. Tae Brown THRASHER .

. THE BuUTCHER-BIRD

. THE SCARLET TANAGER .

. THE Sone Sparrow 3 ‘

. THe Fretp SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER
. Some Apri, SPARROWS

. THE RoSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK

. THe Buvue Jay

. Tae Kinesirp ,

. THe HuMMINGBIRD

. Tae Cammney SwIrt -

. NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL

. THe FLIcKkER

. THe BirtERN

. Brrps ror EvEeRYBODY

. WINTER PENSIONERS . ,

. WATCHING THE PROCESSION

. SOUTHWARD Bounp

InpEXx 5 . a

105

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Paar

Buuge Jay. . « ++ « (page 43) Frontispiece

GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLET . 2
CHICKADEE , - : ; F 2 ‘ F ‘ . 8
Brown CREEPER . : , - F * F ‘ 12
Brown THRASHER . . s ° F ‘ . 16
ScaRLET TANAGER é S r “ . : 5 22,
Sone SPARROW . Fi ‘ . : P 3 - . 26
RosSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK . : F ‘ 3 ‘ 40
RuBy-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD ; r : , . 52
NIGHTHAWEK . - 3s 3 ‘ F 3 F ‘ 60
WHIP-POOR-WILL 7 . ‘ 7 é . , . 62
FLickER . - . : ‘ F s - s j 64

The illustrations entitled A Downy Woodpecker and A Branch Estab-
lishment, facing page 88, are from photographs by Mr. Frank M. Chap-
man and were first printed in Bird-Lore.

EVERYDAY BIRDS

I
TWO LITTLE KINGS

Tue largest bird in the United States is the
California vulture, or condor, which measures
from tip to tip of its wings nine feet and a half.
At the other end of the scale are the humming-
birds, one kind of which, at least, has wings that
are less than an inch and a half in length. Next
to these insect-like midgets come the birds which
have been well named in Latin “ Regulus,” and
in English “ kinglets,” — that is to say, little
kings. The fitness of the title comes first from
their tiny size, — the chickadee is almost a giant
in comparison,—and next from the fact that
they wear patches of bright color (crowns) on
their heads.

Two species of kinglets are found at one season
or another in nearly all parts of the United
States, and are known respectively as the golden-
crown—or goldcrest—and the ruby-crown.

2 EVERYDAY BIRDS

The golden-crown has on the top of its head an
orange or yellow patch (sometimes one, some-
times the other) bordered with black; the ruby-
crown wears a very bright red patch, though you
may look at many specimens without finding it.
Only part ‘of the birds have it, — the adult males,
perhaps, — and even those that have it do not
always display it. The.orange or yellow of the
goldcrest, on the other hand, is worn by all the
birds, and ‘is never concealed. If you are a be-
ginner in bird study, uncertain of your species,
look for the black stripes on the crown. If they
are not there, and the bird is really a kinglet, it
must be a ruby-crown. You may know it, also,
—from the goldcrest, I mean, — by what looks
like a light-colored ring round the eye. In
fact, one of the ruby-crown’s most noticeable
peculiarities is a certain bareheaded, large-eyed
appearance.
' Unless your home is near or beyond the
northern boundary of the United States, you
need not look for either kinglet in summer.
The ruby-crown is to be seen during its migra-
tions in spring and fall, the goldcrest in fall,
winter, and spring.

At any time of the year they are well worth
knowing. Nobody could look at them without
admiration ; so pretty, so tiny, and so exceed-

pe OS ee i |

GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLET

1. Male. 2. Female

TWO LITTLE KINGS 3

ingly quick and graceful in their motions. Both
species are of a prevailing greenish or olive shade,
with noticeable light-colored wing-bars, and light,
unstreaked, unspotted under parts.

The ruby-crown is famous as a singer. A
genuine music-box, we may call him. In spring,
especially, he is often bubbling over with melody ;
a rapid, wren-like tune, with sundry quirks and
turns that are all his own; on the whole de-
cidedly original, with plenty of what musical
people call accent and a strongly marked rhythm
or swing. Over and over he goes with it, as if
he could never have enough; beginning with
quick, separate, almost guttural notes, and wind-
ing up with a twittity, twittity, twittity, which,
once heard, is not likely to be soon forgotten.

A very pleasing vocalist he surely is; and
when his extreme smallness is taken into account
he is fairly to be esteemed a musical prodigy.
Every one who has written about the song, from
Audubon down, has found it hard to say enough
about it. Audubon goes so far as to say that it
is as powerful as a canary’s, and much more
varied and pleasing. That I must think an ex-
aggeration ; natural.enough, no doubt, under the
circumstances (romantic surroundings count for
a good deal in all questions of this kind), but
still a stretching of the truth. However, I give

4 EVERYDAY BIRDS

but my own opinion. Let my readers hear the
bird, and judge for themselves. They will enjoy
him, whether or no. Every such new acquaint-
ance that a man makes is a new source of life-
long happiness.

The enormous California vulture is said to be
almost dumb, having “no vocal apparatus ” and
“emitting only a weak hissing sound.” What
a contrast between him and the ruby-crown, —a
mere speck of a bird, but with a musical nature
and the voice of an artist. Precious stuff, they
say, comes in small packages. Even the young-
est of us may have noticed that it is always the
smaller birds that sing.

But if all the singers are small birds, it is not
true that all small birds are singers. The golden-
crowned kinglet, for example, is hardly to be
classed under that head. The gifts of Providence
are various, and are somewhat sparingly dealt
out. One creature receives one gift, another
creature another, — just as is true of men, women,
and children. This boy “has an ear,” as the
saying goes. He is naturally musical. Give him
a chance, and let him not be too much in love
with something else, and he will make a singer,
or a player on instruments, or possibly a com-
poser. His brother has no ear; he can hardly
tell Old Hundred from Yankee Doodle. It is

TWO LITTLE KINGS 5

useless for him to “take lessons.” He can paint,
perhaps, or invent a machine, or make money, or
edit a paper, or teach school, or preach sermons,
or practice medicine; but he will never win a
name in the concert room.

The case of the golden-crown is hardly so
hopeless as that, I am glad to believe; for if he
is not much of a musician now, as he surely is
not, he is not without some signs of an undevel-
oped musical capacity. The root of the matter
seems to be in him. He tries to sing, at any rate,
and not unlikely, as time goes on,—say na
million or two of years, —he may become as
capable a performer as the ruby-crown is at pre-
sent. There is no telling what a creature may
make of himself if his will is good, and he has
astronomical time in which to work. The dullest
of us might learn something with a thousand
years of schooling.

What you will mostly hear from the goldcrest
is no tune, but a hurried zee, zee, zee, repeated at
intervals as he flits about the branches of a tree,
or, less often, through the mazes of a piece of
shrubbery. His activity is wonderful, and his
motions are really as good as music. No dancing
could be prettier to look at. All you need is
eyes to see him. But you will have to “look
sharp.” Now he is there for an instant, snatch-

6 EVERYDAY BIRDS

ing a morsel or letting out a zee, zee, zee. Now
he is yonder, resting upon the air, hovering
against a tuft of pine needles, his wings all in a
mist, they beat so swiftly. So through the tree
he goes, and from one tree to another, till pre-
sently he is gone for good.

Once in a great while you may find him feed-
ing among the dry leaves on the ground. Then
you can really watch him, and had better make
the most of your opportunity. Or you may
catch him exploring bushes or low savins, which
is a chance almost as favorable. The great thing
is to become familiar with his voice. With that
help you will find him ten times as often as with-
out it. He is mostly a bird of the woods, and
prefers evergreens, though he does not confine
himself to them.

If you do not know him already, it will be a
bright and memorable day — though it be the
dead of winter— when you first see him and
are able to call him by his regal name, Regulus
satrapa. It is a great pity that so common
and lovely a creature, one of the beauties of the
world, should be unseen by so many good peo-
ple. It is true, as we say so often about other
things, that they do not know what they miss;
but they miss a good deal, notwithstanding.

II
THE CHICKADEE

THE chickadee, like many other birds, takes
his name from his notes; from some of his notes,
that is to say, for he has many others besides his
best-known chick-a-dee-dee-dee. His most musi-
cal effort, regarded by many observers as his
true song, sounds to most ears like the name
Pheebe, — a clear, sweet whistle of two or three
notes, with what musical people call a minor in-
terval between them. It is so strictly a whistle
that any boy can imitate it well enough to de-
ceive not only another boy, but the bird himself.

In late winter and early spring, especially,
when the chickadee is in a peculiarly cheerful
frame of mind, it is very easy to draw him out
by whistling these notes in his hearing. Some-
times, however, the sound seems to fret or anger
him, and instead of answering in kind, he will
fly near the intruder, scolding dee-dee-dee.

He remains with us both summer and winter,
and wears the same colors at all seasons.

8 EVERYDAY BIRDS

Perhaps no wild bird is more confiding. If a
man is at work in the woods in cold weather, and
at luncheon will take a little pains to feed the
chickadees that are sure to be more or less about
him, he will soon have them tame enough to pick
up crumbs at his feet, and even to take them
from his hand.

Better even than crumbs is a bit of mince pie,
or a piece of suet. I have myself held out a
piece of suet to a chickadee as I walked through
the woods, and have had him fly down at once,
perch on my finger hke a tame canary, and fall
to eating. But he was a bird that another man,
a woodcutter of my acquaintance, had tamed in
the manner above described.

The chickadee’s nest is built in a hole, gener-
ally in a decayed stump or branch. It is very
pretty to watch the pair when they are digging
out the hole. All the chips are carried away and
dropped at a little distance from the tree, so that
the sight of them littering the ground may not
reveal the birds’ secret to an enemy.

Male and female dress alike. The top of the
head is black — for which reason they are called
black-capped chickadees, or black-capped __ tit-
mice — and the chin is of the same color, while
the cheeks are clear white. If you are not sure
that you know the bird, stay near him till he

CHICKADEE
1. Male. 2. Female

THE CHICKADEE 9

pronounces his own name. He will be pretty
certain to do it, sooner or later, especially if you
excite him a little by squeaking or chirping to
him.

Although the chickadee is small and delicate-
looking, he seems not to mind the very coldest
of weather. Give him enough to eat, and the
wind may whistle. He picks his food, tiny in-
sects, insects’ eggs, and the like, out of crevices
in the bark of trees and about the ends of twigs,
and so is seldom or never without resources. The
deepest snows do not cover up his dinner-table.
His worst days, no doubt, are those in which
everything is covered with sleet.

One of his prettiest traits is his skill in hang-
ing back downward from the tip of a swinging
branch or from the under side of a leaf while in
search of provender. As a small boy, who had
probably been to the circus, once said, the chick-
adee is a “first-rate performer on the flying
trapeze.”

Til
THE BROWN CREEPER

In the midst of a Massachusetts winter, when
a man with his eyes open may walk five miles
over favorable country roads and see only ten or -
twelve kinds of birds, the brown creeper’s faint
zeep is a truly welcome sound. He is a very
little fellow, very modestly dressed, without a
bright feather on him, his lower parts being
white and his upper parts a mottling of brown
and white, such as a tailor might call a “ pepper
and salt mixture.”

The creeper’s life seems as quiet as his colors.
You will find him by overhearing his note some-
where on one side of you as you pass. Now
watch him. He is traveling rather quickly, with
an alert, business-like air, up the trunk of a tree
in a spiral course, hitching along inch by inch,
hugging the bark, and every little while stop-
ping to probe a crevice of it with his long,
curved, sharply pointed bill. He is in search
of food, — insects’ eggs, grubs, and what not;
morsels so tiny that it need not surprise us to see

THE BROWN CREEPER 11

him spending the whole day in satisfying his
hunger.

There is one thing to be said for such a life:
the bird is never without something to take up
his mind. In fact, if he enjoys the pleasures of
the table half as well as some human beings seem
to do, his life ought to be one of the happiest
imaginable.

How flat and thin he looks, and how perfectly
his colors blend with the grays and browns of
the mossy bark! No wonder it is easy for us to
pass near him without knowing it. We under-
stand now what learned people mean when they
talk about the “ protective coloration” of ani-
mals. A hawk flying overhead, on the lookout
for game, must have hard work to see this bit
of a bird clinging so closely to the bark as to be
almost a part of it.

And if a hawk does pass, you may be pretty
sure the creeper will see him, and will flatten
himself still more tightly against the tree and
stay as motionless as the bark itself. He needs
neither to fight nor to run away. His strength,
as the prophet said, is to sit still.

But look! As the creeper comes to the upper
part of the tree, where the bark is less furrowed
than it is below, and therefore less likely to con-
ceal the scraps of provender that he is in search

12 EVERYDAY BIRDS

of, he suddenly lets go his hold and flies down
to the foot of another tree, and begins again to
creep upward. If you keep track of him, you
will see him do this hour after hour. He never
walks down. Up, up, he goes, and if you look
sharply enough, you will see that whenever he
pauses he makes use of his sharp, stiff tail-
feathers as a rest —a kind of camp-stool, as it
were, or, better still, a bracket. He is built for
his work; color, bill, feet, tail-feathers — all
were made on purpose for him.

He is a native of the northern country, and
therefore to most readers of this book he is a
winter bird only. If you know his voice, you
will hear him twenty times for once that you see
him. If you know neither him nor his voice, it
will be worth your while to make his acquaint-
ance.

When you come upon a little bunch of chick-
adees flitting through the woods, listen for a
quick, lisping note that is something like theirs,
but different. It may be the creeper’s, for al-
though he seems an unsocial fellow, seldom flock-
ing with birds of his own kind, he is fond of the
chickadee’s cheerful companionship.

To see him and hear his zeep, you would never
take him for a songster ; but there is no telling
by the looks of a bird how well he can sing. In

THE BROWN CREEPER 13

fact, plainly dressed birds are, as a rule, the best
musicians. The very handsome ones have no
need to charm with the voice. And our modest
little creeper has a song, and a fairly good one ;
one that answers his purpose, at all events, al-
though it may never make him famous. In
springtime it may be heard now and then even
in a place like Boston Common ; but of course
you must go where the birds pair and nest if you
would hear them at their finest; for birds, like
other people, sing best when they feel happiest.

The brown creeper’s nest used to be something
of a mystery. It was sought for in woodpeck-
ers’ holes. Now it is known that as a general
thing it is built behind a scale of loose bark on
a dead tree, between the bark and the trunk.
Ordinarily, if not always, it will be found under a
flake that is loose at the bottom instead of at the
top. Into such a place the female bird packs
tightly a mass of twigs and strips of the soft in-
ner bark of trees, and on the top of this prepares
her nest and lays her eggs. Her mate flits to
and fro, keeping her company, and once in a
while cheering her with a song, but so far as has
yet been discovered he takes no hand in the work
itself. It is quite possible that the female, who
is to occupy the nest, prefers to have her own
way in the construction of it.

14 EVERYDAY BIRDS

After the young ones are hatched, at all events,
the father bird’s behavior leaves nothing to be
complained of. He “ comes to time,” as we say,
in the most loyal manner. In and out of the
nest he and the mother go, feeding their hungry
charges, making their entry and exit always at
the same point, through the merest crack of a
door, between the overhanging bark and the tree,
just above the nest. It is a very pretty bit of
family life.

It would be hard to imagine a nest better con-
cealed from a bird’s natural enemies, especially
when, as is often the case, the tree stands in
water on the edge of a stream or lake. And
not only is the nest wonderfully well hidden, but
it is perfectly sheltered from rain, as it would not
be if it were built under a strip of bark that was
peeled from above. All in all, we must respect
the simple, demure-looking creeper as a very
clever architect.

IV
THE BROWN THRASHER

Tue brown thrasher — called also the brown
thrush —is a bird considerably longer than a
robin, with a noticeably long tail and a long,
curved bill. His upper parts are reddish brown
or cinnamon color, and his lower parts white or
whitish, boldly streaked with black. You will
find him in hedgerows, in scrub-lands, and about
the edges of woods, where he keeps mostly on or
near the ground. His general manner is that of
a creature who wishes nothing else so much as to
escape notice. “Only let me alone,” he seems
to say. If he sees you coming, as he pretty cer-
tainly will, he dodges into the nearest thicket or
barberry-bush, and waits for you to pass.

Farmers know him as the “ planting-bird.”
In New England he makes his appearance with
commendable punctuality between the twentieth
of April and the first of May; and while the
farmer is planting his garden, the thrasher en-
courages him with song. One man, who was
planting beans, imagined that the bird said,

16 EVERYDAY BIRDS

“Drop it, drop it! Cover it up, cover it up!”
Perhaps he did. It was good advice, anyhow.

In his own way the thrasher is one of the
great singers of the world. He is own cousin to
the famous mockingbird, and at the South, where
he and the mocker may be heard singing side by
side, — and so much alike that it is hard to tell
one from the other, — he is known as the “ brown
mocking-bird.”” He would deserve the title but
for one thing — he does not mock. In that re-
spect he falls far short of his gray cousin, who not
only has all the thrasher’s gift of original song,
but a most amazing faculty of imitation, as every
one knows who has heard even a caged mocking-
bird running over the medley of notes he has
picked up here and there and carefully rehearsed
and remembered. The thrasher’s song is a med-
ley, but not a medley of imitations.

I have said that the thrasher keeps near the
ground. Such is his habit; but there is one
exception. When he sings he takes the very
top of a tree, although usually it is not a tall
one. There he stands by the half-hour together,
head up and tail down, pouring out a flood of
music; sounds of all sorts, high notes and low
notes, smooth notes and rough notes, all jum-
bled together in the craziest fashion, as if the
musician were really beside himself.

THE BROWN THRASHER 17

It is a performance worth buying a ticket for
and going miles to hear; but it is to be heard
without price on the outskirts of almost any vil-
lage in the United States east of the Rocky
Mountains and south of Maine. You must go
out at the right time, however, for the bird sings
but a few weeks in the year, although he remains
in New England almost six months, or till the
middle of October. He is one of the birds that
every one should know, since it is perfectly easy
to identify him ; and once known, he is never to
be forgotten, or to be confounded with anything
else.

The thrasher’s nest is a rude, careless-looking
structure, made of twigs, roots, and dry leaves,
and is to be looked for on the ground, or in a
bush not far above it. Often it has so much the
appearance of a last year’s affair that one is
tempted to pass it as unworthy of notice. I have
been fooled in that way more than once.

The bird sits close, as the saying is, and as
she stares at you with her yellow eyes, full at
once of courage and fear, you will need a hard
heart to disturb her. Sometimes she will really
show fight, and she has been known to drive a
small boy off the field. Her whistle after she
has been frightened from her eggs or nestlings
is one of the most pathetic sounds in nature. I

18 EVERYDAY BIRDS

should feel sorry for the boy who could hear it
without pity.

Besides this mournful whistle, the thrasher
has a note almost exactly like a smacking kiss,
—very realistic, — and sometimes, especially at
dusk, an uncanny, ghostly whisper, that seems
meant expressly to suggest the presence of some-
thing unearthly and awful. So far as I am
aware, there is no other bird-note like it. I have
no doubt that many a superstitious person has
taken to his heels on hearing it from the bushes
along a lonesome roadside after nightfall.

Except in the spring, indeed, there is little
about the thrasher’s appearance or behavior to
suggest pleasant thoughts. To me, at any rate,
he seems a creature of chronic low spirits. The
world has used him badly, and he cannot get
over it. He is almost the only bird I ever see
without a little inspiration of cheerfulness. Per-
haps I misjudge him.

Let my young readers make his acquaintance
on their own account, if they have not already
done so, and find him a livelier creature than I
have described him, if they can.

V
THE BUTCHER-BIRD

‘“‘ BUTCHER-BIRD ” is not a very pretty name,
but it is expressive and appropriate, and so is
likely to stick quite as long as the more bookish
word “shrike,” which is the bird’s other title.
It comes from its owner’s habit of impaling the
carcasses of its prey upon thorns, as a butcher
hangs upon a hook the body of a pig or other
animal that he has slaughtered.

In a place like the Public Garden of Boston,
if a shrike happens to make it his hunting-ground
for a week or two, you may find here and there
in the hawthorn-trees the body of a mouse or the
headless trunk of an English sparrow spitted upon
a thorn. Grasshoppers are said to be treated
in a similar manner, but I have never met with
the bird’s work in the grasshopper season.

The shrike commonly seen in the Northern
States is a native of the far north, and comes
down to our latitude only in cold weather. He
travels singly, and if he finds a place to suit him,
a place where the living is good, he will often

20 EVERYDAY BIRDS

remain almost in the same spot for weeks
together.

In size and appearance he resembles the mock-
ingbird. His colors are gray, black, and white,
his tail is long, and his bill is hooked like a
hawk’s.

He likes a perch from which he can see a good
distance about him. A telegraph wire answers
his purpose very well, but his commonest seat is
the very tip of a tallish tree. If you look across
a field in winter and descry a medium-sized bird
swaying on the topmost twig of a lonesome tree,
balancing himself by continual tiltings of his
long tail, you may set him down as most likely
a butcher-bird.

His flight is generally not far from the ground,
but as he draws near the tree in which he means
to alight, he turns suddenly upward. It would
be surprising to see him alight on one of the
lower branches, or anywhere, indeed, except at
the topmost point.

Small birds are all at once scarce and silent
when the shrike appears. Sometimes in his
hunger he will attack a bird heavier than him-
self. I had once stopped to look at a flicker ina
roadside apple-tree, when I suddenly noticed a
butcher-bird not far off. At the same moment,
as it seemed, the butcher-bird caught sight of the
flicker, and made a swoop toward him. The

THE BUTCHER-BIRD 21

flicker, somewhat to my surprise, showed no sign
of panic, or even of fear. He simply moved
aside, as much as to say, “Oh, stop that! Don’t
bother me!” How the affair would have re-
sulted, I cannot tell. To my regret, the shrike at
that moment seemed to become aware of a man’s
presence, and flew away, leaving the woodpecker
to pursue his exploration of the apple-tree at his
leisure.

The shrike has a very curious habit of singing,
or of trying to sing, in the disjointed manner of
a catbird. I have many times heard him thus
engaged, and can bear witness that some of his
tones are really musical. Some people have sup-
posed that at such times he is trying to decoy
small birds, but to me the performance has al-
ways seemed like music, or an attempt at music,
rather than strategy.

Southern readers may be presumed to be fa-
miliar with another shrike, known as the logger-
head. As I have seen him in Florida he is a very
tame, unsuspicious creature, nesting in the shade-
trees of towns. The “French mocking-bird,” a
planter told me he was called. Mr. Chapman
has seen one fly fifty yards to catch a grasshop-
per which, to all appearance, he had sighted
before quitting his perch. The power of flight
is not the only point as to which birds have the
advantage of human beings.

VI
THE SCARLET TANAGER

Wuen I began to learn the birds, I was living
in a large city. One of the first things I did,
after buying a book, was to visit a cabinet of
mounted specimens —“ stuffed birds,” as we
often call them. Such a wonderful and confus-
ing variety as there was to my ignorant eyes!
Among them I remarked especially a gorgeous
scarlet creature with black wings and a black tail.
It was labeled the scarlet tanager. So far as I
was concerned, it could not have looked more
foreign if it had come from Borneo. My book
told me that it was common in Massachusetts. It
might be, I thought, but I had never seen it
there. And a bird so splendid as that! Bright
enough to set the woods on fire! How could I
have missed it ?

Well, there came a Saturday, with its half-
holiday for clerks, and I went into the country,
where I betook myself to the woods of my native
village, the woods wherein I had rambled all the
years of my boyhood. And that afternoon, be-

THE SCARLET TANAGER 23

fore I came out of them, I put my opera-glass on
two of those wonderful scarlet and black birds.
It was a day to be remembered.

Since that time, of course, I have seen many
like them. In one sense, their beauty has become
to me an old story; but I hope that I have set
here and there a reader on a hunt that has been
as happily rewarded as mine was on that bright
summer afternoon. In one respect, the beginner
has a great advantage over an old hand. He has
the pleasure of more excitement and surprise.

The bird to be looked for is a little longer than
a bluebird, of a superb scarlet color except for
its wings and tail, which, as I have said, are jet-
black. Ispeak of the male in full spring costume.
His mate does not show so much as a red feather,
but is greenish yellow, or yellowish green, with
dark — not black — wings and tail.

You may see the tanager once in a while in
the neighborhood of your house, if the grounds
are set with shade-trees, but for the most part
he lives in woods, especially in hard woods of a
fairly old growth.

One of the first things for you to do, with him
as with all birds, is to acquaint yourself with his
call-notes and his song. The call is of two syl-
lables, and sounds like chip-chirr. It is easily
remembered after you have once seen the bird in

24 EVERYDAY BIRDS

the act of uttering it. The song is much in the
manner of the robin’s, but less smooth and flow-
ing. I have often thought, and sometimes said,
that it is just such a song as the robin might
give us if he were afflicted with what people call
a“ hoarse cold.” The bird sings as if his whole
heart were engaged, but at the same time in a
noticeably broken and short-winded style.

The oftener you hear him, the easier you will
find it to distinguish him from a robin, although
at first you may find yourself badly at a loss.
A boy that can tell any one of twenty playmates
by the tones of his voice alone will need nothing
but practice and attention to do the same for a
great part of the sixty or seventy kinds of com-
mon birds living in the woods and fields about
him.

The tanager’s nest is built in a tree, on the
flat of a level branch, so to speak, generally
toward the end. Sometimes, at any rate, it isa
surprisingly loose, carelessly constructed thing,
through the bottom of which one can see the
blue or bluish eggs while standing on the ground
underneath.

Tt must be plain to any one that the mother
bird, in her dull greenish dress, is much less
easily seen, and therefore much less in danger, as
she sits brooding, than she would be if she wore

THE SCARLET TANAGER 25

the flaming scarlet feathers that render her mate
so handsome.

Southern readers will know also another kind
of tanager, not red and black, but red all over.
He, too, is a great beauty, although if the ques-
tion were left to me, I could not give him the
palm over his more northern relative. The red
of the southern bird is of a different shade
— “rose-red” or “vermilion,” the books call
it. He sings like the scarlet tanager, but in a
smoother voice. Although he is a red bird, he
is not to be confounded with the southern red-
bird. The latter, better known as the cardinal
grosbeak, is a thick-billed bird of the sparrow and
finch family. He is frequently seen in cages,
and is a royal whistler.

The scarlet tanager —the male in red and
black plumage — is not to be mistaken for any-
thing else in the Eastern States. Once see him,
and you will always know him. For that reason
he is an excellent subject for the beginner. He
passes the winter in Central or South America,
and returns to New England in the second week
of May. He makes his appearance in full dress,
but later in the season changes it for one resem-
bling pretty closely the duller plumage of his

mate.

VII
THE SONG SPARROW

Sparrows are of many kinds, and in a gen-
eral way the different kinds look so much alike
that the beginner in bird study is apt to find
them confusing, if not discouraging. They will
try his patience, no matter how sharp and clever
he may think himself, and unless he is much
cleverer than the common run of humanity, he
will make a good many mistakes before he gets
to the end of them.

One of the best and commonest of them all is
the song sparrow. His upper parts are mottled,
of course, since he is a sparrow. His light-
colored breast is sharply streaked, and in the
middle of it the streaks usually run together and
form a blotch. His outer tail-feathers are not
white, and there is no yellow on the wings or
about the head. These last points are mentioned
in order to distinguish him from two other spar-
rows with streaked breasts — the vesper sparrow
and the savanna.

By the middle of March song sparrows reach

SONG SPARROW
4. Male. 2. Female

THE SONG SPARROW 27

New England in crowds, — along with robins
and red-winged blackbirds, —and are to be
heard singing on all hands, especially in the
neighborhood of water. They remain until late
autumn, and here and there one will be found
even in midwinter.

The song, for which this sparrow is particu-
larly distinguished, is a bright and lively strain,
nothing very great in itself, perhaps, but thrice
welcome for being heard so early in the season, '
when the ear is hungry after the long winter
silence. Its chief distinction, however, is its
amazing variety. Not only dono two birds sing
precisely alike, but the same bird sings many
tunes.

Of this latter fact, which I have known some
excellent people to be skeptical about, you can
readily satisfy yourself, —and there is nothing
like knowing a thing at first hand, —if you will
take the pains to keep a singer under your eye
at the height of the musical season. You will
find that he repeats one strain for perhaps a
dozen times, without the change of a note; then
suddenly he comes out with a song entirely dif-
ferent. This second song he will in turn drop
for a third, and so on. The bird acts, for all the
world, as if he were singing hymns, of so many
verses each, one after another.

28 EVERYDAY BIRDS

It is really a wonderful performance. There
are very few kinds of birds that do anything like
it. Of itself it is enough to make the song spar-
row famous, and it is well worth any one’s while
to hear it and see it done. Nobody can see it
without believing that birds have a true appre-
ciation of music. They are better off than some
human beings, at all events. They know one
tune from another.

A lady correspondent was good enough to
send me, not long ago, a pleasing account of the
doings of a pair of song sparrows, which, as she
says, came to her for six seasons.

“One year,” she writes, “they happened to
build where I could watch them from the win-
dow, and they did a very curious thing. They
fed the little birds with all sorts of worms of dif-
ferent colors until they were ready to leave the
nest; then the male brought a pure white moth
and held it near the nest, which was in some
stems of a rosebush a few inches from the
ground, on a level with the lower rail of a picket
fence.

“One of the little birds came out of the nest
at once and followed its parent, who went side-
wise, always holding the dazzling white morsel
just out of the youngster’s reach. In this man-
ner they crossed the lane, climbed the inclined

THE SONG SPARROW 29

plane of a woodpile, and passed through a fence
and across a vegetable garden into an asparagus
bed, in which miniature forest the little traveler
received and ate the moth.

“ Another nest was built on the bank of a
brook on the farther side of a road. Out of
this nest I saw two little fellows coaxed with
these snow-white moths, and led across the dusty
road into a hedge.”

One or two experiences of this kind are suffi-
cient reward for a good deal of patient obser-
vation. The singer of this pair of birds, my
correspondent says, had ten distinct songs, one
of them exceedingly beautiful and peculiar.

The song sparrow’s nest is usually built on
the ground, and the bird is one of several kinds
that are known indiscriminately by country
people as ground sparrows.

Song sparrows seem to be of a pretty nervous
disposition, to judge from their behavior. One
of their noticeable characteristics is a twitching,
up-and-down, “ pumping ” motion of the tail, as
they dash into cover on being disturbed.

People who live in the Southern States see
these birds only in the cooler part of the year,
but must have abundant opportunity to hear
them sing as spring approaches.

Vill
THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER

Au beginners in bird study find the sparrow
family a hard one. There are so many kinds
of sparrows, and the different kinds look so con-
fusingly alike. How shall I ever be able to tell
them apart ? the novice says to himself.

Well, there is no royal road to such learning,
it may as well be confessed. But there is a road,
for all that, and a pretty good one, — the road
of patience ; and there is much pleasure to be
had in following it. If you know one sparrow,
be it only the so-called “ English,” you have
made a beginning.

If you know the English sparrow, I say ; for,
strange as it may seem, I find numbers of peo-
ple who do not. Take the average inhabitant
of any of our large cities into the country, and
let him come upon an English sparrow in a way-
side hedge, and there are three chances to one
that he will not know with certainty what to
call it. Quite as likely as not he has never
noticed that there are two kinds of English spar-

THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 31

rows, very differently feathered —the male and
the female.

In a short chapter like this I am not going to
attempt a miracle. If you read it to the end,
never so carefully, you will not be prepared to
name all the sparrows at sight. As I said be-
fore, they are a hard set. My wish now is to
speak of two of the smallest and commonest.

One of these is called sometimes the chipping
sparrow, sometimes the chipper, and sometimes
— much less often — the doorstep sparrow. Per-
sonally, I like the last name best, — perhaps be-
cause I invented it. Scientific men, who prefer
for excellent reasons to have their own names
for things, call him Spizella socialis — that is to
say, the familiar or social little spiza, or sparrow.
The idea of littleness, some young readers may
not know, is contained in the termination ella,
which is what grammarians call a diminutive.
Umbrella, for instance, is literally a small wmbra,
or shade.

With most readers of this book the chipping
sparrow is a bird of spring, summer, and autumn..
For the winter he retires to our extreme ‘South-
ern States and to Mexico. If you live in Massa-
chusetts, you may begin to be on the watch for
him by the 5th of April. If your home is farther
south, you should see him somewhat earlier.

32 EVERYDAY BIRDS

Perhaps you will know him by this brief de-
scription : a very small, slender sparrow, with a
dark chestnut-red crown, a black forehead, a
black bill, and plain — unstreaked and unspotted
— under parts.

His ordinary note, or call, is a chip (whence
his name), and his song is a very dry, tuneless,
monotonous, long-drawn chippy-chippy-chippy,
uttered so fast as to sound almost like a trill.
You may like the bird never so well, but if you
have any idea of music, you will never call him a
fine singer. What he and his mate think about
the matter there is, of course, no telling. He
seems to be very much in earnest, at all events.

He is a social bird, I say. You will not have
to go far afield or into the woods in search of
him. If you live in any sort of country place,
with a bit of garden and a few shrubs and fruit
trees, a pair of chippers will be likely to find you
out. Their nest will be built in a tree or bush,
a small structure neatly lined with hair, and in
due time it will contain four or five eggs, blue
or greenish blue, with brown spots.

Our other bird is of the chipper’s size, and,
like him, has unstreaked and unspotted lower
parts. His bill is of a light color, “ reddish
brown,” one book says, “ pale reddish,” says an-
other. This is one of the principal marks for

THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 33

the beginner to notice. Another is a wash of
buff, or yellowish brown, on the sides of the
breast. The upper parts, too, are in general
much lighter than the chipper’s.

You will not be likely often to find this bird
in your garden or about the lawn. He is called
the field sparrow, but he lives mostly in dry old
pastures, partly overgrown with bushes and trees.
His nest is placed on the ground, or in a low
bush, and is often lined wholly or in part with
hair. He and the chipper belong to what is
called the same genus. That is to say, the two
are so nearly related that they have the same
surname. The chipper is Spizella socialis, the
field sparrow is Spizella pusilla; just as two
brothers will have one name in common, say,
Jones, William, and Jones, Andrew.

The chipper is a favorite on account of his
familiar, friendly ways. The field sparrow de-
serves to be known and loved for his music.
Few birds sing better, in my opinion, though
many make more display and are more talked
about. The beauty of the song is in its sweet-
ness, simplicity, and perfect taste. It begins
with three or four longer notes, which run at
once into quicker and shorter ones, either on the
same pitch ora little higher. Really the strain
is almost too simple to make a description of : a

34 EVERYDAY BIRDS

simple line of pure melody, one may say. You
must hear it for yourself. Sometimes the bird
gives it out double, so to speak, catching it up
again just as he seems ready to finish. The tone
is the clearest of whistles, and the whole effect is
most delightful and soothing. It is worth any-
body’s while to spend a season or two in bird
study, if only to learn this and half a dozen more
pieces of our common wild-bird music.

The field sparrow’s times of arrival and depar-
ture are practically the same as the chipper’s.
Neither bird is hard to see, or very hard to dis-
tinguish ; a bit of patience and an opera-glass
will do the business ; though you may have to
puzzle awhile over either of them before making
quite sure of your knowledge. In bird study, as
in any other, we learn by correcting our own
mistakes.

IX

SOME APRIL SPARROWS

For the first three weeks of April the ornithol-
ogist goes comparatively seldom into the woods.
Millions of birds have come up from the South,
but the forest is still almost deserted. May, with
its hosts of warblers, will bring a grand change
in this respect; meanwhile the sparrows are in
the ascendant, and we shall do well to follow the
road for the most part, though with frequent
excursions across fields and into gardens and or-
chards. Of eighty-four species of birds seen by
me in April, a year ago, twenty-one were water
birds, and of the remaining sixty-three, twenty,
or almost one third, were members of the spar-
row family, while only five were warblers. In
May, on the other hand, out of one hundred and
twenty-five species seen twenty-three were war-
blers, and only eighteen were sparrows. To re-
present the case fairly, however, the comparison
should be by individuals rather than by species,
and for such a comparison I have no adequate
data. My own opinion is that of all the birds

36 EVERYDAY BIRDS

commonly seen in April, more than half, perhaps
as many as four fifths, are members of the spar-
row family. There are days, indeed, when the
song sparrows alone seem to outnumber all other
birds, and other days when the same is true of
the snowbirds.

The large and noble sparrow family, which
includes not only the sparrows, commonly so
called, but finches, grosbeaks, crossbills, snow-
birds, buntings, and the like, is represented in
North America by more than ninety species, and
in Massachusetts by about forty. It is preém-
inently a musical family, and, with us at least,
April is the best month of the twelve in which
to appreciate its lyrical efforts, notwithstanding
the fact that one of its most distinguished song-
sters, the rose-breasted grosbeak, is still absent.

Among the more gifted of its April represent-
atives are the fox sparrow, — so named from his
color, —the purple finch, the song sparrow, the
vesper sparrow, the tree sparrow, the field spar-
row, and the white-throated sparrow — seven
common birds, every one of them deserving to
be known by any who care for sweet sounds.

One of the seven, the purple finch, also called
the linnet, is unlike all the others, and easily
excels them all in the fluency and copiousness
of his music. He is readily distinguishable — in

SOME APRIL SPARROWS 37

adult male plumage —as a sparrow whose head
and neck appear to have been dipped in carmine
ink, or perhaps in pokeberry juice. His song is
a prolonged, rapid, unbroken warble, which he
is much given to delivering while on the wing,
hovering ecstatically and singing as if he would
pour out ‘his very soul. He is a familiar bird, a
lover of orchards and roadside trees, but is not
so universally distributed, probably, as most of
the other species I have named.

In contrast with the purple finch, all the six
sparrows here mentioned with him have brief and
rather formal songs. Those of the fox sparrow
and the tree sparrow bear a pretty strong resem-
blance to each other, especially as to cadence or
inflection; the song sparrow’s and the vesper
sparrow’s are still more closely alike, and will
almost certainly confuse the novice, while those
of the field sparrow and the white-throat are each
quite unique. .

The fox sparrow visits Massachusetts as a
migrant only, and the same might be said of the
white-throat, only that it breeds in Berkshire
County and single birds are often seen in the
eastern part of the State during the winter. The
tree sparrow is a winter resident, going far north
to rear its young, and the remaining four species
are with us for the summer.

38 EVERYDAY BIRDS

The fox sparrow is to be heard from the 20th
of March (I speak roughly) to the middle of April.
In respect to voice and cadence, he is to me the
finest of our sparrows proper, though I do not
think him so finished an artist as the song and
vesper sparrows. He may be recognized by his
superior size and his bright rusty-red (reddish
brown) color. Indeed, these two features give
him at first sight the appearance of a thrush. He
is one of thesparrows — like the song, the vesper,
the savanna, and the Ipswich — which are thickly
streaked upon the breast.

The tree sparrow passes the winter with us, as
I have said, but abounds only during the two
migrations. He is in full song for the greater
part of April. His distinctive marks are a bright
reddish (“chestnut ”’) crown, conspicuous white
wing-bars, and an obscure round blotch in the
middle of his unstreaked breast.

The white-throat, commonly a very abundant
migrant, arrives about the 20th of April and re-
mains till about the middle of May. His loud,
clear song is remarkable for its peculiar and
strongly marked rhythm. It consists of two com-
paratively long introductory notes, followed by
three sets of triplets in monotone— like see, see,
peabody, peabody, peabody. This bird, too,
perplexing as the sparrows are usually thought

SOME APRIL SPARROWS 39

to be, is perfectly well marked, with a white
throat (not merely a white chin, as in the swamp
sparrow) and a broad white stripe on each side
of the crown, turning to yellow in front of the
eyes. The crown itself is dark, with a white line
through the middle, and each wing is adorned
with two white bars. In size the white-throat
comes next to the fox sparrow.

The song sparrow and the vesper. sparrow not
only sing alike, but look alike. The latter may
be told at once, however, by his white outer tail
feathers, which show as he flies. These are two
of our commonest and worthiest birds. The ves-
per sparrow, more generally known, perhaps, as
the bay-winged bunting, likes a drier field than
the song sparrow, and is especially noticeable for
his trick of running along the path or the road
directly in front of the traveler.

x
THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK

THERE is never a May passes, of recent years,
but some one comes to me, or writes to me, to
inquire about a wonderfully beautiful bird that
he has just seen for the first time. He does
hope I can tell him what it is. It is a pretty
large bird, he goes on to say, — but not so long
as a robin, he thinks, if I question him, — mostly
black and white, but with such a splendid rosy
patch on his breast or throat! What can it be?
He had no idea that anything so handsome was
ever to be seen in these parts.

If all the questions that people ask about
birds were as easily answered as this one, I should
be thankful. It is a rose-breasted grosbeak, I
tell the inquirer. Perhaps he noticed that its bill
was uncommonly stout. If he did, the fact is
exceptional, for somehow the shape of the bill is
a point which the average person seems very sel-
dom to notice, although it is highly important.
Anyhow, the rosebreast’s beak is most decidedly
“gross.” And he is every whit as beautiful as

THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 41

my inquirer represents him to be. In that re-
spect he ranks with the oriole and the scarlet
tanager.

He is distinguished also for his song, which is
a flowing warble, wonderfully smooth and sweet.
To most ears it bears a likeness to the robin’s
song, but it is beyond comparison more fluent and
delicious, although not more hearty. Keep your
ear open for such a voice,— by the middle of
May if you live in New England, a little earlier
if your home is farther south, — and you will be
likely to hear it; for at that time the bird is not
only common, but a very free singer.

In addition to his song, the rosebreast has
a short call-note, which sounds very much like
the squeak of a pair of rusty shears—a kind
of hic, which you will find no difficulty about
remembering if you have once learned it. His
nest is generally built in a bush, often within
reach of the hand, but I have seen it well up in
a rather tall tree. The two birds spell each
other in brooding, and are not only mutually
affectionate, but very brave. I have known the
mother bird to keep her seat even when I took
hold of the bush below the nest and drew her
almost against my face. She, by the way, is
a very modestly dressed body, being not only
without the rose-color, but without the clear

42 EVERYDAY BIRDS

contrast of black and white. To look at her,
you might take her for a large sparrow.

The rose-color of the male, it should be said,
is not confined to the patch on the breast, but is
found also on the lining of the wings, where it
is mostly unnoticed by the world, but where his
mate, of course, cannot help admiring it as he
flutters about her; for it is certain that female
birds have a good eye for color, and believe that
fine feathers help, at least, to make fine birds.
The shade is of the brightest and most exquisite,

‘and the total effect of the male’s plumage — jet
black, pure white, and vivid rose-red — is quite
beyond praise.

The birds, happily, are not shy, and prefer
a fairly open or broken country rather than a
dense wood. Last season one sang day after
day directly under my windows, and undoubt-
edly had a mate and a nest somewhere close by.
The male, it should be added, has the very
pretty though dangerous-seeming habit of sing-
ing as he sits upon the eggs.

XI

THE BLUE JAY

Some years ago, as the story comes to me, two

collectors of birds met by accident in South
America, one of them from Europe, the other
from the United States. “ There is one bird that
I would rather see than any other in the world,”
said the European. “It is the handsomest of
all the birds that fly, to my thinking, although
I know it only in the cabinet. You have it in
North America, but I suppose you do not often
see it. I mean the blue jay.”

What the American answered in words, I do
not know; but I am pretty confident that he
smiled. The European might almost as well
have said that he supposed Boston people did
not often see an English sparrow. Not that the
blue jay swarms everywhere as the foreign spar-
row swarms in our American cities; but it is so
common, so noisy, sO conspicuous, and so unmis-
takable, that it is, or ought to be, almost an
everyday sight to all country dwellers.

Strange as it seems, however, I find many

44 EVERYDAY BIRDS

people who do not know the jay when they see
it. In late winter, say toward the end of Febru-
ary, when I begin to be on the lookout for the
first bluebird of the year, I am all but certain to
have word brought to me by some one of the
village school-teachers that bluebirds have al-
ready come. Johnny This or Jimmy That saw
one near his house several weeks ago! That
“ several weeks ago” makes me suspicious, and
on following up the matter I discover that John
and James have seen a large blue bird, larger
than a robin, with some black and white on him
— all white underneath —and wearing a tall
crest or topknot. Then I know.that they have
mistaken a blue bird for a bluebird. They have
seen a blue jay, a bird of a very different feather.
He has been with us all winter, as he always is,
and has been in sight from my windows daily.
So easy is it for boys and men to guess at things,
and guess wrong.

The jay is a relative of the crow, and has
much of the crow’s cleverness, with more than
the crow’s beauty. Like the crow, if he has an
errand near houses, he makes a point of doing it
in the early morning before the folks who live
in the houses have begun to stir about. In fact,
he knows us, in some respects at least, better
than we know him, and habitually takes advan-

THE BLUE JAY 45

tage of what no doubt seems to him a custom of
very late rising on the part of human beings.

Among small birds of all sorts he bears a de-
cidedly bad name. In nesting time you may
hear them uttering a chorus of loud and bitter
laments as often as he appears among them.
Their eggs and young are in danger, and they
join forces to worry him and drive him away.
One bird sounds the alarm, another hears him
and hastens to see what is going on, and in a
few minutes the whole neighborhood is awake.
And it stays awake till the jay moves off. After
that piece of evidence, you do not need to see
him doing mischief. The little birds’ behavior
is sufficiently convincing. As Thoreau said, the
presence of a trout in the milk is something like
proof.

And jays, in their turn, club together against
enemies larger than themselves. Last autumn
I was walking through the woods with a friend,
—a city schoolmaster eager for knowledge, as
every schoolmaster ought to be, — when we heard
a great screaming of blue jays from a swampy
thicket on our right hand.

“ Now what do you suppose the birds mean
by all that outcry?” said my friend.

I answered that very likely there was a hawk
or an owl there.

46 EVERYDAY BIRDS

“Let’s go and see,” said the master, and we
turned in that direction. Sure enough, we soon
came face to face with a large hen-hawk perched
in one of the trees, while the jays, one after
another, were dashing as near him as they dared,
yelling at him as they passed.

At our nearer approach the hawk took wing ;
then the jays disappeared, and silence fell upon
the woods. And I dare say the schoolmaster
gave me credit for being a wondrously wise man!

The jay has many notes, and once in a great
while may even be heard indulging in something
like a warble. One of his most musical calls
sounds to my ears a little like the word “ lily.”

He seems to be very fond of acorns, and is
frequently to be seen standing upon a limb,
holding an acorn under his claw and hammering
it to pieces with all the force of his stout bill.
When angered, he scolds violently, bobbing up
and down in a most ridiculous manner. In fact,
he is of a highly nervous temperament, and as
full of gesticulations as a Frenchman.

To me he is especially a bird of autumn. At
that season the woods are loud with his clarion,
and as I listen to it I can often feel myself a
boy again, rambling in the woods that knew me
in my school-days. With all his faults — his ill
treatment of small birds, I mean —I should be
sorry to have his numbers greatly diminished.

XII

THE KINGBIRD

As a very small boy I spent much time in a
certain piece of rather low ground partly grown
up to bushes. Here in early spring I picked
bunches of pretty pink and white flowers, which
I now know to have been anemones. In the
same place, a month or two later, I gathered
splendid red lilies, and admired, without gather-
ing it, a tiny blue flower with a yellow centre.
This would not bear taking home, but was al-
ways an attraction to me. I should have liked
it better still, I am sure, if some one had been
kind enough to tell me its pretty name — blue-
eyed grass.

Here, also, I picked the first strawberries of
the season and the first blueberries. They were
luxuries indeed. A “ gill-cup”’ full of either of
them was good pay for an hour’s search.

In one corner of the place there were half a
dozen or so of apple-trees, and on the topmost
branches of these there used to perch continually
two or three birds of a kind which some older

48 EVERYDAY BIRDS

boy told me were kingbirds. At these my bro-
ther and I — both of us small enough to be ex-
cusable for such mischief — were in the habit of
throwing green apples; partly to see how near
we could come to hitting them, partly for the
fun of watching them rise into the air, circle
about with sharp cries, and then settle back upon
the perches they had left. Sometimes we stuck
the half-grown apple on the end of a stick, swung
the stick round our heads, and sent the apple
flying to a tremendous distance. Stick or no
stick, however, we were in no danger of killing
anything, as I am glad now to remember.

What amazed us was that the birds did not go
away. No matter how long we “appled” them,
they were certain to be on hand the next day in
the same place. We must have been very young
and very green, — greener even than the apples,
— for it never occurred to us that the birds had
nests in the trees, and for that reason were not
to be driven away by our petty persecutions.

Even then I noticed the peculiar flight of the
birds — the short, quick strokes of their wings,
and their habit of hovering. These are among
the signs by whicli the kingbird can be recog-
nized a long way off. He is dark-colored above,
—almost black, — pure white underneath, and
his tail, when outspread, shows a broad white

THE KINGBIRD 49

border at the tip. On his crown is an orange
red patch, but you will probably never see it
unless you have the bird in your hand and brush
apart the feathers in search of it.

The kingbird’s Latin name has much the same
meaning as his common English one. Tyrannus
tyrannus he is called by scientific people. He
belongs to a family known as flycatchers, birds
that catch insects on the wing. That is the rea-
son why the kingbird likes a perch at the tip of
something, so that he can dart out after a pass-
ing insect, catch it, and return to his perch to
wait for another. J should call him the “ apple-
tree flycatcher,” if the matter were referred to
me.

He is not large, —little bigger than an Eng-
lish sparrow, — but he has plenty of courage and
a strong disposition to “rule the roost,” as the
saying goes. Every country boy has laughed to
see the kingbird chasing a crow. And a very
lively and pleasing sight it is: the crow making
for the nearest wood as fast as his wings will
carry him, and one or two kingbirds in hot pur-
suit. Their great aim is to get above him and
swoop down upon his back. Sometimes you will
see one actually alight on a crow’s back and, as
boys say, “give it to him” in great style.

Another taking action of the kingbird is his

50 EVERYDAY BIRDS

trick of flying straight up in the air, almost per-
pendicularly, as if he were trying to see how near
he could come to performing that impossible feat,
and then tumbling about madly, with noisy out-
cries. Often it looks as if he actually turned
somersaults. He cannot sing, and so has to let
his high spirits bubble over in these half-crazy
gymnastics. All in all, he is a very lively and
entertaining customer.

His nest is built in a tree, often in an orchard,
and is comparatively easy to find. The birds
arrive in New England in the first week of May,
having passed the winter in Central or South
America, and remain till the end of August.

Like most birds, they are very punctual in
their coming and going. No doubt they have
an almanac of their own. You will do well to
find one of them in Massachusetts after the first
two or three days of September.

Toward the end of their stay, flycatchers
though they are, they feed largely upon berries.
I have seen a dozen in one small dogwood bush,
all eating greedily.

XIII
THE HUMMINGBIRD

Humminepirps are found only in America
and on the islands near it. They are of many
kinds, but only one kind is ever seen in the east-
ern United States. This is known as the ruby-
throated hummingbird, because of a splendid red.
throat-patch worn by the male. To speak more
exactly, the patch is red only in some lights.
You see it one instant as black as a coal, and the
next instant it flashes like a coal on fire. This
ornament,—a real jewel, —with the lovely
shining green of the bird’s back, makes him an
object of great beauty.

Every one knows him, or would do so only
that some people confuse him with bright-colored,
long-tongued hummingbird moths that are seen
hovering, mostly in the early evening, over the
flowers of the garden.

The ruby-throat spends the winter south of
the United States. He arrives in Florida in
March, but does not reach New England till near
the middle of May.

52 EVERYDAY BIRDS

Many persons seem to imagine that the hum-
mer lives on the wing. They have never seen
one sitting still, they say. But the truth is that
hummingbirds pass but a small part of the time
in the air. They are so very small, however,
that they are easily overlooked on a branch of a
tree, and the average person never notices them
except when the hum of their wings attracts his
attention.

One of the prettiest sights in the world is a
hummingbird hovering before a blossom, his
wings vibrating so fast as to make a mist about
him, and his long needle of a bill probing the
flower with quick, eager thrusts. All his move-
ments are of lightning-like rapidity, and even
while your eyes are on him he is gone like a
flash, you cannot say whither.

The hummingbird’s nest is built on a branch
of a tree,— saddled on it, and is not very
hard to find after you have once seen one, and
so have learned precisely what to look for.
Generally it is placed well out toward the end of
the limb. I have found it on pitch-pines in the
woods, on roadside maples, — shade trees, — and
especially in apple and pear orchards. The mo-
fher bird is very apt to betray its whereabouts
by buzzing about the head of any one who
comes near it.

THE HUMMINGBIRD 53

Last May, for example, I stopped in the mid-
dle of the road to listen for the voice of a house
wren, when I caught instead the buzz and squeak
of ahummer. Turning my gaze upward, I saw
her fly to a half-built nest on a maple branch
directly over my head.

The nest is a tiny thing, looking for size and
shape like a cup out ofa child’s toy tea-set. Its
walls are thick, and on the outside are covered
—shingled, we may say —with bits of gray
lichen, which help to make the nest look like
nothing more than a knot. Whether they are
put on for that purpose, or by way of ornament,
is more than I can tell.

The bird always lays two white eggs, about
as large as peas. The young ones stay in the
nest for three weeks, more or less, till they are
fully grown and fledged, and perfectly well able
to fly. I once saw one take his first flight, and
a great venture it seemed. All these three
weeks, and for another week afterward, the
mother — no father is present — has her hands
full to supply the little things with food, which
she gives them from her crop, thrusting her
long, sharp bill clean down their throats in the
process, in a way to make a looker-on shiver.
The only note I have ever heard from the ruby-
throat is a squeak, which seems to be an expres-

54 EVERYDAY BIRDS

sion of nervousness or annoyance, and is uttered
whenever an intruder —a man, a cat, or a
strange bird — comes near the tree in which her
treasures are hidden.

Hummingbirds sometimes fly into open win-
dows and are caught. At such times they be-
come tame almost at once, but it is difficult, if
not impossible, to keep them alive in captivity,
and it is cruel to attempt it, except when the
little creature is injured and plainly unable to
look out for itself.

A lady of my acquaintance discovered a hum-
mingbird under her piazza. It had flown in by
accident, probably, and now was darting to and
fro in a frantic attempt to get out. The piazza
was open on three sides, to be sure, but the
frightened bird kept up against the ceiling, and
of course found itself walled in.

Fearful that it would injure itself, the lady
brought a broom and tried to force it to come
down and so discover its.way out; but it was
only the more scared. Then a happy thought
came to her. She went to the garden, plucked
a few flowers, and going back to the piazza, set
them down for the bird to see. Instantly it flew
toward them, and as it did so it saw the open
world without, and away it went.

Another lady wrote me once a very pretty

THE HUMMINGBIRD 55

story of a hummer that came and probed a nas-
turtium which she held in her hand.

It is wonderful to think that so tiny a bird,
born in New England or in Canada in June,
should travel to Cuba or Central America in the
autumn, and the next spring find its way back
again to its birthplace.

XIV
THE CHIMNEY SWIFT

Every kind of bird is adapted to get its living
in a particular way. It is strong in some re-
spects, and weak in others. Some birds have
powerful legs, but can hardly fly ; others live on
the wing, and can hardly walk. Of these flying
birds none is more common than the chimney
swift, or, as he is improperly called, the chimney
swallow. No one ever saw him sitting on a
perch or walking on the ground. In fact, his
wings are so long, and his legs so short and weak,
that if he were to alight on the ground, he would
probably never be able to rise into the air
again.

He hardly seems to need a description, and
yet I suppose that many persons, not to say
people in general, do not know him from a swal-
low. His color is sooty brown, turning to gray
on the throat. His body, as he is seen in the
air, is shaped like a bobbin, bluntly pointed at
both ends. If he is carefully watched, however,

THE CHIMNEY SWIFT 57

it will be noticed that he spreads his tail for an
instant whenever he changes suddenly the direc-
tion of his flight. In other words, he uses his
tail as a rudder.

He shoots about the sky at a tremendous
speed, much of the time sailing, with his long, nar-
row wings firmly set, and is especially lively and
noisy toward nightfall. Very commonly two or
three of the birds fly side by side, cackling
merrily and acting very much as if they were
amusing themselves with some kind of game.

They feed on the wing, and have wide, gaping
mouths perfectly adapted to that purpose.

As their name implies, they build their nests
and pass the night mostly in chimneys, although
in the wilder parts of the country they still
inhabit hollow trees. Numbers of pairs live
together in a colony.

One of the chimneys of a certain house near
the Charles River, in Newton, Massachusetts, has
for many years been a favorite resort of swifts.
I have many times visited the place to watch the
birds go to roost. Little by little they gather in
a flock, as twilight comes on, and then for an
hour or more the whole company, hundreds in
number, go sweeping over the valley in broad
circles, having the chimney for a centre. Grad-
ually the circles become narrower, and at the

58 EVERYDAY BIRDS

same time the excitement of the flock increases.
Again and again the birds approach the chim-
ney, as if they meant to descend into it. Then
away they shoot for another round.

At length the going to roost actually begins.
Half a dozen or a dozen of the birds drop one
by one into the chimney. The rest sweep away,
and when they come back, a second detachment
drops in. And so the lively performance goes
on till the last straggler folds his wings above
the big black cavity and tumbles headlong out
of sight.

The swift makes his nest of twigs, and as he
cannot alight on the ground in search of them,
he is compelled to gather them from the dead
limbs of trees. Over and over again you will
see the bird dart against such a limb, catching
at a twig as he pauses for the merest instant be-
fore it. It is difficult to be sure whether he suc-
ceeds or not, his movements are so rapid, but it
is certain that he must often fail. However, he
acts upon the old motto, “ Try, try again,” and
in course of time the nest is built. And an
extremely pretty nest it is, with the white eggs
in it, the black twigs glued firmly together with
the bird’s own saliva.

XV
NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL

Rustic people are a little shy of theories and
“book-learning.”” Not long ago — it was early
in March —I met an old man who lives by him-
self in a kind of hermitage in the woods, and
who knows me in a general way as a bird stu-
dent. We greeted each other, and I inquired
whether he had seen any bluebirds yet. No, he
said, it was n’t time.

“ Oh, but they are here,” I answered. “I saw
a flock of ten on the 26th of February.” Good-
natured incredulity came out all over his face.

“ Did you hear them sing?” he asked.

“ Yes,” said I; “and, furthermore, I saw
some this forenoon very near your house.”

“Well,” he remarked, “according to my ex-
perience, it is too early for bluebirds. Besides,
they never go in flocks ; and when anybody tells
me at this time of the year that he has seen a
flock of bluebirds, I always know that he has seen
some blue snowbirds.”’

60 EVERYDAY BIRDS

He spoke with an air of finality which left me
nothing to do but to smile and pass on.

This little incident called to mind another, and
that put it into my head to write this article.

A farmer, who had seen me passing his house
and loitering about his lanes and fields for sev-
eral years, often with an opera-glass in my hand,
one day hailed me to ask whether the nighthawk
and the whip-poor-will were the same bird, as he
had heard people say. I assured him (or rather
I told him — it turned out that I had not made
him sure) that they were quite distinct, and pro-
ceeded to remark upon some of the more obvious
points of difference between the two, especially
as to their habits and manner of life. He lis-
tened with all deference to what I had to offer,
but as I concluded and turned to leave him, he
said: “ Well, some folks say they’re the same.
They say one’s the he one and t’ other’s the she
one; but I guess they ain’t.”

Verily, thought I, popular science lectures are
sometimes a failure. Not long afterward I was
telling the story to a Massachusetts man, aman who
had made a collection of birds’ eggs in his time.

“Why,” said he, “aren’t they the same? I
always understood that they were the male and
female of the same species. That was the com-
mon belief where I was brought up.”

NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 61

The confusion of the two birds is widespread,
in spite of Audubon’s testimony that he had sel-
dom seen a farmer or even a boy in the United
States who did not know the difference between
them. But, while they resemble each other
closely, they are sufficiently unlike to be classi-
fied not only as separate species, but as species
of different genera. As for the difference in
their habits, it is such as any one may see and
appreciate. The nighthawk, for all its name, is
not a night bird. It is most active at twilight,
—in other words, it is crepuscular instead of
nocturnal, — but is often to be seen flying abroad
at midday. The whip-poor-will, on the contrary,
is quiet till after dark. Then it starts into full-
ness of life, singing with the utmost enthusiasm,
till the listener wonders where it can find breath
for such rapid and long-continued efforts. The
nighthawk is not a musician. While flying it
frequently utters a single note, of a guttural-
nasal quality, almost indistinguishable from the
so-called bleat of the woodcock; but, in place of
singing, it indulges in a fine aerial tumbling per-
formance, much in the manner of the snipe.
This performance I have many times observed
in early summer from the Public Garden in Bos-
ton. I have seen it also in September, though
it is doubtless much less common at that season.

62 EVERYDAY BIRDS

The bird rises gradually to a considerable height,
and presently drops like a stone almost to the
ground. At the last moment it arrests itself sud-
denly, and then is heard a very peculiar “ boom-
ing” noise, whether produced by the wings or
by the voice, I will not presume to say.

The most attractive feature of the nighthawk,
to my eye, is its beautiful and peculiar flight —
a marvel of ease and grace, and sufficient to dis-
tinguish it at a glance from every other New
England bird. It is a creature of the upper air,
never skimming the ground, so far as I know,
and as it passes overhead you may easily see the
large white patch in the middle of each long
wing —a beauty spot, by the way, which is
common to both sexes, and is wanting in the
whip-poor-will.

The whip-poor-will’s chief distinction is its
song —a song by itself, and familiar to every
one. Some people call it mournful, and I fear
there are still a few superstitious souls who listen
to it with a kind of trembling. I have heard of
the bird’s being shot because the inhabitants of a
house could not bear its doleful and boding cry,
as they were pleased to consider it. To my ears
it is sweet music. I take many an evening stroll
on purpose to enjoy it, and am perennially thank-
ful to Audubon for saying that he found the

NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 63

whip-poor-will’s “ cheering voice” more interest-
ing than the song of the nightingale.

It will surprise unscientific readers to be told
that the nearest relatives of whip-poor-wills and
nighthawks are the swifts and the humming-
birds. As if a chimney swift were more like a
whip-poor-will than like a swallow! and, still
more absurd, as if there were any close relation-
ship between whip-poor-wills and hummingbirds !
Put a whip-poor-will and a ruby-throated hum-
mer side by side and they certainly do look very
little alike—the big whip-poor-will, with its
mottled plumage and its short, gaping beak, and
the tiny hummingbird with its burnished feathers
and its long needle of a bill. Evidently there
is no great reliance to be placed upon outside
show, or what scientific men call “ external
characters.” We might as well say that thé
strawberry vine and the apple-tree were own
cousins. Yes, so we might, for the apple-tree
and the strawberry vine are cousins — at least
they are members of the same great and noble
family, the family of the roses! We shall never
get far, in science or in anything else, until we
learn to look below the surface.

XVI
THE FLICKER

Tue flicker is the largest of our common
American woodpeckers, being somewhat longer
and stouter than the robin. It is known, by
sight at least, to almost every one who notices
birds at all, and perhaps for this reason it has
received an unusual number of popular names.
“‘ Golden-winged woodpecker,’ which is proba-
bly the best known of these, comes from the fact
that the bird’s wings are yellow on the under
side. “ Harry Wicket,” “‘ Highhole,’ — because
its nest is sometimes pretty far above the ground,
— “ Yellowhammer,” and “ Pigeon-woodpecker ”
are also among its more familiar nicknames.

Unlike other birds of its family, the flicker
passes much of its time on the ground, where
it hops awkwardly about, feeding upon insects,
especially upon ants. As you come near it,
while it is thus engaged, it rises with a peculiar
purring sound, and as it flies from you it shows
a broad white patch on its rump —the lower

FLICKER

1. Male. 2. Females

THE FLICKER 65

back, above the root of the tail. Every one who
has ever walked much over grassy fields must
have seen the bird and been struck by this con-
spicuous light mark. He must have noticed,
too, the bird’s peculiar up-and-down, “ j jumping ”
manner of flight, by which it goes swooping
across the country in long undulations or
waves.

The flicker’s general color is brown, with spot-
tings and streakings of black, and more or less
of violet or lilac shading. On the back of its
neck it wears a band of bright scarlet, and across
its breast is a conspicuous black crescent.

It is fond of old apple orchards, and often
makes its nest in a decaying trunk. In some
places, near the seashore, especially, — where it
is commoner than elsewhere in winter, and where
large trees are scarce, —it makes enemies by its
habit of drilling holes in barns and even in
churches. I remember a meeting-house on Cape
Cod which had a good number of such holes in
its front wall— or rather it had the scars of
such holes, for they had been covered with
patches of tin. That was a case where going to
church might be called a bad habit.

In fall and winter, if not at other seasons, the
flicker feeds largely upon berries. In years
when the poison ivy bears a good crop, I am

66 EVERYDAY BIRDS

pretty sure to find two or three flickers all winter
long about a certain farm, the stone walls of
which are overrun with this handsome but un-
wholesome vine, although it is hard to imagine
that the dry, stony fruit should yield much in
the way of nourishment, even to a woodpecker.

As spring comes on, the flicker becomes
numerous and very noisy. His best known vocal
effort is a prolonged hi-hi-hi, very loud and ring-
ing, and kept up until the listener wonders where
the author of it gets his wind. This, I think, is
the bird’s substitute for a song. He has at all
times a loud, unmusical yawp, — a signal, I sup-
pose, — and in the mating season especially he
utters a very affectionate, conversational wicker
or flicker. Every country boy should be familiar
with these three notes.

But besides being a vocalist, — we can hardly
call him a singer, — the flicker is a player upon
instruments. He is a great drummer; and if
any one imagines that woodpeckers do not enjoy
the sound of their own music, he should watch
a flicker drumming with his long bill on a bat-
tered tin pan in the middle of a pasture. Morn-
ing after morning I have seen one thus engaged,
drumming lustily, and then cocking his head to
listen for an answer; and Paderewski at his
daily practice upon the piano could not have

THE FLICKER 67

looked more in earnest. At other times the
flicker contents himself with a piece of resonant
loose bark or a dry limb.

One proof that this drumming — which is
indulged in by woodpeckers generally —is a
true musical performance, and not a mere drill-
ing for grubs, is the fact that we never hear it
in winter. It begins as the weather grows mild,
and is as much a sign of spring as the peeping
of the little tree-frogs — hylas — in the meadow.

The flicker’s nest, as I have said, is built in a
hole in a tree, often an apple-tree. Very noisy
in his natural disposition, he keeps a wise silence
while near the spot where his mate is sitting, and
will rear a brood under the orchard-owner’s nose
without betraying himself. The young birds
are fed from the parent’s crop, as young pigeons
and young hummingbirds are. The old bird
thrusts its bill down the throat of the nestling
and gives it a meal of partially digested food by
what scientific people call a process of regurgita-
tion. Farmers’ boys, who have watched pigeons
feeding their squabs, will know precisely what is
meant.

XVII
THE BITTERN

Ir was a great day for me when I first heard
the so-called booming of the bittern. For more
than ten years I had devoted the principal part
of my spare hours to the study of birds, but
though I had taken many an evening walk near
the most promising meadows in my neighbor-
hood, I could never hear those mysterious pump-
ing or stake-driving noises of which I had read
with so much interest, espécially in the writings
of Thoreau.

The truth was, as I have since assured: myself,
that this representative of the heron family was
not a resident within the limits of my everyday
rambles, none of the meadows thereabout being
extensive and secluded enough to suit his whim.

There came a day, however, when with a
friend I made an afternoon excursion to Way-
land, Massachusetts, on purpose to form the
stake-driver’s acquaintance. We walked up the
railway track across the river toward Sudbury,

THE BITTERN 69

and were hardly seated on the edge of the
meadow, facing the beautiful Nobscot Hill, be-
fore my comrade said, “ Hark! There he is!”

Yes, that certainly was the very sound — an
old-fashioned wooden pump at work in the
meadow.

We listened intently for perhaps half a dozen
times; then I proposed going further up the
track to get the notes at shorter range, and pos-
sibly — who could tell what unheard-of thing
might happen ? — to obtain a sight of the bird.
We advanced cautiously, though as we were on
the track, six feet or more above the level of the
meadow, there was no chance of concealment,
and the bittern went on with his performance.

Meanwhile we maintained a sharp lookout, and
presently I descried a narrow brown object stand-
ing upright amidst the grass — a stick, perhaps.
I lifted my opera-glass and spoke quickly to my
friend: “TI see him!”

“Where?” he asked; and when I lowered
my glass and gave him the bird’s bearings as
related to the remains of an old hayrick not far
off, he said, “ Why, I saw that, but took it for a
stick.”

“‘ Yes, but see the eye,” I answered.

Within half a minute the bird suddenly threw
his head forward and commenced pumping.

70 EVERYDAY BIRDS

This was good luck indeed,— that I should
surprise my very first bittern in his famous act,
a thing which better men than I, after years of
familiarity with the bird, had never once suc-
ceeded in accomplishing. Who says that For-
tune does not sometimes favor the fresh hand ?

The fellow repeated the operation three times,
and between whiles moved stealthily through
the grass toward the leavings of the haycock
before mentioned.

When he reached the hay, we held our breath.
Would he actually mount it? Yes, that was
undoubtedly his intention; but he meant to do
it in such a way that no mortal eye should see
him. All the time glancing furtively to left and
right, as if the grass were full of enemies, he put _
one foot before the other with almost inconceiv-
able slowness, — as the hour hand turns on the
clock’s face. It was an admirable display of an
art which this race of frog, mouse, and insect
catchers has cultivated for untold generations —
an art on which its livelihood depends, the art
of invisible motion.

There was no resisting the ludicrousness of
his manner. He was in full view, but so long
as he kept still he seemed to think himself quite
safe from detection. Like the hand of the clock,
however, if he was slow he was sure, and in time

THE BITTERN 71

he was fairly out of the grass, standing in plain
sight upon his hay platform.

Once in position he fell to pumping in earnest,
and kept it up for more than an hour, while two
enthusiasts sat upon the railway embankment,
twelve or thirteen rods distant, with opera-glasses
and note-books, scrutinizing his every motion,
and felicitating themselves again and again on
seeing thus plainly what so few had ever seen at
all. What would Thoreau have given for such
an opportunity ?

“The stake-driver is at it in his favorite
meadow,” he writes in his journal, in 1852. “I
followed the sound, and at last got within two
rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing’
you, like a will-o’-the-wisp, farther away into the
meadows. When thus near, I heard some lower
sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump
or a stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed
the gurgling, pumping notes fit to come from a
meadow.

“ This was just within the blueberry and other
bushes, and when the bird flew up, alarmed, I
went to the place, but could see no water, which
makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in
making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so
deep as to reach water where it is dry on the
surface.”

72 EVERYDAY BIRDS

This notion that water is employed in the pro-
duction of the bittern’s notes has been generally
entertained. The notes themselves are of a char-
acter to suggest such an hypothesis, and at least
one witness has borne circumstantial testimony
to its truth. In Thoreau’s essay on the “ Natu-
ral History of Massachusetts,” he says : —

‘On one occasion, the bird has been seen by
one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the
water, and suck up as much as it could hold;
then, raising its head, it pumped it out again
with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it
two or three feet, and making the sound each
time.”

Similar statements have been made as to the
corresponding notes of the European bittern.
None of our systematic writers upon American
ornithology have ever witnessed the performance,
as far as appears, and being too honest to draw
upon their imaginations, they have left the matter
a mystery. Now, on this auspicious May after-
noon, if we learned nothing else, we could at all
events make quite sure whether or not the bittern
did really spout water from his beak.

My readers will have guessed already that our
bird, at least, did nothing of the sort. His bill
was never within reach of water. The operation
is a queer one, hard to describe.

THE BITTERN 73

The bittern has been standing motionless, per-
haps in the humpbacked attitude in which the
artists, following Audubon’s plate, have com-
monly represented him; or quite as likely, he
has been making a stick or a soldier of himself,
standing bolt upright at full stretch, his long
neck and bill pointed straight at the zenith.

Suddenly he lowers his head, and instantly
raises it again and throws it forward with a
quick, convulsive jerk. This movement is at-
tended by an opening and. shutting of the bill,
which in turn is accompanied by a sound which
has been well compared to a violent hiccough.
The hiccough — with which, I think, the click of
the big mandibles may sometimes be heard — is
repeated a few times, each time a little louder
than before; and then succeed the real pumping
or stake-driving noises.

These are in sets of three syllables each, of
which the first syllable is the longest, and some-
what separated from the others. The accent is
strongly upon the middle syllable, and the whole,
as oftenest heard, is an exact reproduction of the
sound of a wooden pump, as I have already said,
the voice having that peculiar hollow quality
which is produced, not by the flow of the water,
but by the suction of the air in the tube when
the pump begins to work.

74 EVERYDAY BIRDS

But the looker-on is likely to be quite as much
impressed by what he sees as by what he hears.
During the whole performance, but especially
during the latter part of it, the bird is engaged
in the most violent contortions, suggestive of
nothing but a patient suffering from uncontrol-
lable nausea. Moreover, as soon as the prelimi-
nary hiccoughs begin, the lower throat or breast
is seen to be swelling; the dilatation grows
larger and larger till the pumping is well under
way, and so far as my companion and I could
detect, does not subside in the least until the
noises have ceased altogether.

How are the unique, outlandish notes pro-
duced? I cannot profess to know. Our opinion
was that the bird swallowed air into his gullet,
gulping it down with each snap of the beak. To
all appearance it was necessary for him to inflate
the crop in this way before he could pump, or
boom. As to how much of the grand booming
was connected with the swallowing of the air,
and how much, if any, with the expulsion of it,
my friend and I did not agree, and of course
neither of us could do more than guess.

I made some experiments afterwards, by way
of imitating the noises; and these experiments,
together with the fact that the grand booming
seemed to be really nothing more than a develop-

THE BITTERN 75

ment of the preliminary hiccoughs, and the fur-
ther fact that the swelling of the breast did not
go down gradually during the course of the per-
formance, but suddenly at the close, — all these
incline me to believe that the notes are mainly if
not entirely caused by the inhalation or swallow-
ing of the air; and I am somewhat strengthened
in this opinion by perceiving that when a man
takes air into his stomach the act is attended by
a sound not altogether unlike the bittern’s note
in quality, while the expulsion of it gives rise to
noises of an entirely dissimilar character.

That the sounds in question were not made
entirely by any ordinary action of the vocal or-
gans was the decided opinion of both my friend
and myself.

As I have said, we watched the performance
for more than an hour. We were sitting squarely
upon the track, and once were compelled to get
up to let a train pass; but the bittern evidently
paid no attention to matters on the railway, being
well used to thunder in that direction, and stood
his ground without wincing.

When he had pumped long enough, — and the
operation surely looked like pretty hard work, —
he suddenly took wing and flew a little distance
down the meadow. The moment he dropped into
the grass he pumped, and on making another

76 EVERYDAY BIRDS

flight he again pumped immediately upon coming
to the ground. This trick, which surprised me
not a little in view of the severe exertion required,
is perhaps akin to the habit of smaller birds, who
in seasons of excitement will very often break
into song at the moment of striking a perch.

As we came down the track on our way back
to the station, three bitterns were in the air at
once, while a fourth was booming on the opposite
side of the road. One of the flying birds per-
sistently dangled his legs instead of drawing
them up in the usual fashion and letting the feet
stick out behind, parallel with the tail. Probably
he was “ showing off,” as is the custom of many
birds during the season of mating.

Our bird across the road, by the bye, was not
pumping, but driving a stake. The middle sylla-
ble was truly a mighty whack with a mallet on
the head of a post, so that I could easily enough
credit Mr. Samuels’s statement that he once fol-
lowed the sound for half a mile, expecting to
find a farmer setting a fence.

In the midst of the hurly-burly we saw a boy
coming toward us on the track.

“Let ’s ask him about it,” said my companion.

So, with an air of inquisitive ignorance, he
stopped the fellow, and inquired, “ Do you know
what it is we hear making that curious noise off
there in the meadow? ”

THE BITTERN q7

The boy evidently took us for a pair of igno-
ramuses from the city.

“T guess it’s a frog,” he answered. But when
the sounds were repeated he shook his head and
confessed honestly that he didn’t know what
made them.

It was too bad, I thought, that he did not
stick to his frog theory. It would have made so
much better a story! He appeared to feel no
curiosity about the matter, and we allowed him
to pass on unenlightened.

Not all Wayland people are thus poorly in-
formed, however, and we shortly learned, to our
considerable satisfaction, that they have a most
felicitous local name for the bird. They call
him “ plum-pudd’n’,” which is exactly what he
himself says, only that his uw is in both words
somewhat long, like the vowel in “full.” To
get the true effect of the words they should be
spoken with the lips nearly closed, and in a deep
voice.

A few days after this excursion I found a bit-
tern in a large wet meadow somewhat nearer
home. At the nearest he was a long way off,
and as I went farther and farther away from
him, I remarked the very unexpected fact that
the last syllable to be lost was not the second,
which bears so sharp an accent, but the long

78 EVERYDAY BIRDS

first syllable. It seemed contrary to reason, but
such was unquestionably the truth, and later
experiments confirmed it.

This was in the spring of 1888. In May of
the next year, if all went well, we would see the
show again. So we said to each other; but a
veteran ornithologist remarked that we should
probably be a good many years older before we
had another such piece of good fortune.

It is a fact familiar to all naturalists, however,
that when you have once found a new plant, or
a new bird, or a new nest, the experience is
likely to be soon repeated. You may have spent
a dozen years in a vain search, but now, for
some reason, the difficult has all at once become
easy, and almost before you can believe your
eyes the rarity has grown to be a drug in the
market. Something like this proved to be true
of the bittern’s boom.

On the afternoon of the 2d of May, 1889, I
went to one of my favorite resorts, a large cat-
tail swamp surrounded by woods. My particu-
lar errand was to see whether the least bittern
had arrived, — a much smaller, and in this part
of the country, at least, a much less common
bird than his relative of whose vocal accomplish-
ments I am here treating.

I threw myself down upon the cliff overhang-

THE BITTERN 79

ing the edge of the swamp, to listen for the
desired coo-coo-coo-coo, and had barely made my-
self comfortable when I heard the plum-pudd’n’
of the bittern himself, proceeding, as it seemed,
from the reeds directly at my feet. Further lis-
tening satisfied me that the fellow was not far
from the end of a rocky peninsula which juts
into the swamp just at this point.

I slipped down the cliff as quietly as possible,
picked my way across the narrow neck leading to
the main peninsula, and by keeping behind rocks
and trees managed to reach the very tip without
disturbing the bird. Here I posted myself among
the thick trees, and awaited a repetition of the
boom. It was not long in coming, and plainly
proceeded from a bunch of flags just across a
little stretch of clear water.

I looked and looked, while the bittern con-
tinued to pump at rather protracted intervals ;
but I could see nothing whatever, till presto!
there the creature stood in plain sight.

Whether he had moved into view, or had all
the time been visible, I cannot tell. He soon
pumped again, and then again, for perhaps six
times. Then he stalked away out of sight, and
I heard nothing more. He was much nearer
than last year’s bird had been, but was still a
pumper, not a stake-driver, and his action was in
all respects the same as I had before witnessed.

80 EVERYDAY BIRDS

There had been no bittern in this swamp the
season previous, nor did any breed here this
summer. I visited the place too often for him
to have escaped my notice, had he been present.
This bird, then, was a migrant, and his booming
was of interest as showing that the bittern, like
the song-birds, does not wait to get into summer
quarters before beginning to rehearse his love
music.

Two days after this my companion of the eae
before went with me again to Wayland, and, not
to prolong a long story, we sat again upon the
railway and watched a bittern pump for more
than an hour. This time, to be sure, he was
partially concealed by the grass, besides being
farther away than we could have wished.

Tt was curious, and illustrated strikingly the
utility of the bird’s habit of standing motionless,
that my friend, who is certainly as sharp-eyed an
observer as I have ever known, was once more
completely taken in. As luck would have it, I
caught sight of the bird first, and when I pointed
him out to the other man he replied, “ Why, of
course I saw that, but it never occurred to me
but that it was a stake.”

We returned from this excursion fairly well
convinced that in the early part of the season,
while the grass is still short, one may hope to

THE BITTERN 81

see a bittern pump almost any day, if he will go
to a suitable meadow which has a railroad run-
ning through it. The track answers a double
purpose: it gives the observer an outlook, such
as cannot be obtained from a boat, and further-
more, the birds are quite unsuspicious of things
on the track, while the presence of a man in the
grass or on the river would almost inevitably
attract their attention.

XVIII
BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY

Some birds belong exclusively to specialists.
They are so rare, or their manner of life is so
seclusive; that people in general can never be
expected to know them except from books. The
latest list of the birds of Massachusetts includes
about three hundred and fifty species and sub-
species. Of these, seventy-five or more are so
foreign to this part of the country as to have ap-
peared here only by accident, while many others
are so excessively rare that no individual observer
can count upon seeing them, however close a
lookout he may keep. Other species are present
in goodly numbers, but only in certain portions
of the State; and still others, though generally
distributed and fairly numerous, live habitually
in almost impenetrable swamps or in deep forests,
and of necessity are seen only by those who make
it their business to look for them.

It is something for which busy men and women
may well be thankful, therefore, that so many of

BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 83

the most pleasing, or otherwise interesting, of all
our birds are among those which may be called
birds for everybody. Such are the robin, the
bluebird, the Baltimore oriole, — or golden robin,
— the blue jay, the crow, and the chickadee. Of
all these we may ay that they are common ; they
come in every one’s way, and, what is still more
to the point, they cannot be mistaken for any-
thing else. Others are equally common, and are
easily enough seen, but their identity is not so
much a matter of course.

The song sparrow, for example, is abundant in
Massachusetts from the middle of March to the
end of October. Outside of the forest itis almost
ubiquitous; it sings beautifully and with the
utmost freedom; it ought, one would say, to be
universally known. But it is a sparrow, not the
sparrow. In other words, it is only one of many,
and so, common as it is, and freely as it sings (it
is to be heard in every garden and by every road-
side in the latter half of March, when few other
birds are in tune), it passes unrecognized by the
generality of people. They read in books of song
sparrows, chipping sparrows, field sparrows, tree
sparrows, swamp sparrows, vesper sparrows, white-
throated sparrows, fox sparrows, yellow-winged
sparrows, savanna sparrows, and the like, and
when they see any little mottled brown bird,

” 84 EVERYDAY BIRDS

they say, “ Oh, it’s a sparrow,” and seek to know
nothing more.

The family of warblers — among the loveliest
of all birds — are in a still worse case, and much
the same may be said of swallows and blackbirds,
thrushes and vireos. The number of species and
their perplexing similarity, which are such an at-
traction to the student, prove an effectual bar to
those who have time and money for newspapers
and novels, but can spare neither for a manual
of local ornithology.

I have named six birds which every one knows,
or may know, but of course I do not mean that
these are all. Why should not everybody know
the goldfinch — a small, stout-billed, bright yel-
low, canary-like bird, with black wings and tail
and a black cap? And the flicker — or golden-
winged woodpecker —a little larger than the
robin, with gold-lined wings, a black crescent on
the breast, a red patch on the back of the head,
and a white rump, conspicuous as the bird takes
wing? The hummingbird, too— our only one ;
I should say that everybody ought to recognize
it, only that I have found some who confuse
it with sphinx moths, and will hardly believe
me when I tell them of their mistake. The
cedar-bird, likewise, known also as the cherry-
bird and the waxwing, is a bird by itself; re-

BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 85

markably trim and sleek, its upper parts of a
peculiarly warm cinnamon brown, its lower parts
yellowish, its tail tipped handsomely with yellow,
its head marked with black and adorned with a
truly magnificent top-knot; as great a lover of
cherries as any schoolboy, and one of the first
birds upon which the youthful taxidermist tries
his hand. Just now —in early March — the
waxwings are hereabout in great flocks (I saw
more than a hundred, surely, three days ago),
stuffing themselves, literally, with savin berries.
These large flocks will after a while disappear,
and some time later, in May, smaller companies
will arrive from the South and settle with us for
the summer, helping themselves to our cherries
in return for the swarms of insects of whose pre-
sence they have relieved us. If we see them thus
engaged, we shall do well to remember the Scrip-
ture text, “ The laborer is worthy of his hire.”
This enumeration of birds, so strongly marked
that even a wayfaring man may easily name them,
might be extended indefinitely. It would be a
strange Massachusetts boy who did not know the
ruffed grouse (though he would probably call
him the partridge) and the Bob White ; the king-
bird, with his black and white plumage, his aerial
tumblings, and his dashing pursuit of the crow;
the splendid scarlet tanager, fiery red, with black

86 EVERYDAY BIRDS

tail and wings; the bobolink; the red-winged
blackbird, whose watery conkaree is so welcome
a sound about the meadows in March; the slate-
colored snowbird ; the indigo-bird, small, deep blue
throughout, and with a thick bill; the butcher-
bird, a constant though not numerous winter vis-
itor, sometimes flying against windows in which
canaries are hung, as one did at our house only
this winter — these surely may be known by any
who will take even slight pains to form their
acquaintance. And, beside these, there are two
birds whom everybody does know, but whom I
forgot to include with the six first mentioned, —
the catbird and the brown thrasher, two over-
grown, long-tailed wrens, near relatives of the
mockingbird, both of them great singers in their
way, and one of them — the catbird — decidedly
familiar and a fairly good mimic.

XIX
WINTER PENSIONERS

Our northern winter is a lean time, ornitho-
logically, though it brings us some choice birds
of its own, and is not without many alleviations.
When the redpolls come in crowds and the white-
winged crossbills in good numbers, both of which
things happened last year, the world is not half
so bad with us as it might be. Still, winter is
winter, a season to be tided over rather than
doted upon, and anything which helps to make
the time pass agreeably is matter for thankful-
ness. So I am asked to write something about
the habit we are in at our house of feeding birds
in cold weather, and thus keeping them under
the windows. Really we have done nothing pecu-
liar, nor has our success been beyond that of many
of our neighbors ; but such as it is, the work has
given us much enjoyment, and the readers of
“ Bird-Lore”* are welcome to the story.

Our method is to put out pieces of raw suet,
mostly the trimmings of beefsteak. These we

1 To which this article was originally contributed.

88 EVERYDAY BIRDS

attach to branches of trees and to the veranda
trellis, taking pains, of course, to have them
beyond the cat’s reach (that the birds may feed
safely), and at the same time well disposed for
our own convenience as spectators. For myself,
in addition, I generally nail pieces of the bait
upon one or two of the outer sills of my study
windows. I like, as I sit reading or writing, to
hear now and then a nuthatch or a chickadee
hammering just outside the pane. Often I rise
to have a look at the visitor. There is nothing
but the glass between us, and I can stand near
enough to see his beady eyes, and, so to speak,
the expression of his face. Sometimes two birds
are there at once, one waiting for the other.
Sometimes they have a bit of a set-to. Then,
certainly, they are not without facial expression.

Once in a while, in severe weather, I have
sprinkled crumbs (sweet or fatty crumbs are best
— say bits of doughnut) on the inside ledge, and
then, with the window raised a few inches, have
awaited callers. If the weather is bad enough
they are not long in coming. A chickadee
alights on the outer sill, notices the open win-
dow, scolds a little (the thing looks like a trap —
at all events it is something new, and birds are
conservative), catches sight of the crumbs (well,
now, that’s another story), ceases his dee, dee,
dee, and the next minute hops inside.

WINTER PENSIONERS 89

The crumbs prove to be appetizing, and by
the time he has swallowed a few of them he
seems to forget how he came in, and instead of
backing out, as a reasonable being like a chick-
adee might be expected to do, he flies to another
light of the bay window. Then, lest he should
injure himself, I must get up and catch him and
show him to the door. By the time I have done
this two or three times within half an hour, I
begin to find it an interruption to other work,
and put down the window. White-breasted nut-
hatches and downies come often to the outer sill,
but only the chickadees ever venture inside.

These three are our daily pensioners. If they
are all in the tree together, as they very often
are, they take precedence at the larder according
to their size. No nuthatch presumes to hurry
a woodpecker, and no chickadee ever thinks of
disturbing a nuthatch. He may fret audibly,
calling the other fellow greedy, for aught I know,
and asking him if he wants the earth; but he
maintains a respectful distance. Birds, like wild
things in general, have a natural reverence for
size and weight.

The chickadees are much the most numerous
with us, but taking the year together, the wood-
peckers are the most constant. My notes record
them as present in the middle of October, 1899,

90 EVERYDAY BIRDS

and now, in the middle of October, 1900, they
are still in daily attendance. Perhaps there were
a few weeks of midsummer when they stayed
away, but I think not. One pair built a nest
somewhere in the neighborhood and depended
on us largely for supplies, much to their con-
venience and our pleasure. As soon as the red-
capped young ones were able to fly, the parents
brought them to the tree and fed them with the
suet (it was a wonder how much of it they could
eat), till they were old enough to help them-
selves. And they act, old and young alike, as if
they owned the place. If a grocer’s wagon hap-
pens to stop under the tree they wax indignant,
and remain so till it drives away. Even the
black cat, Satan, has come to acknowledge their
rights in the case, and no longer so much as
thinks of them as possible game.

I have spoken, I see, as if these three species
were all; but, not to mention the blue jays,
whose continual visits are rather ineffectively
frowned upon (they carry off too much at once),
we had last winter, for all the latter half of it, a
pair of red-bellied nuthatches. They dined with
us daily (pretty creatures they are), and stayed so
late in the spring that I began to hope the handy
food-supply would induce them to tarry for the
summer. They were mates, I think. At any

WINTER PENSIONERS 91

rate, they preferred to eat from the same bit of
fat, one on each side, in great contrast with all
the rest of our company. Frequently, too, a
brown creeper would be seen hitching up the
trunk or over the larger limbs. He likes plea-
sant society, though he has little to say, and
perhaps found scraps of suet in the crevices of
the bark, where the chickadees, who are given
to this kind of providence, may have packed it
in store. Somewhat less frequently a goldcrest
would come with the others, fluttering amid the
branches like a sprite. One bird draws another,
especially in hard times. And so it happened
that our tree, or rather trees, —an elm and a
maple, — were something like an aviary the
whole winter through. It was worth more than
all the trouble which the experiment cost us to
he in bed before sunrise, with the mercury below
zero, and hear a chickadee just outside singing
as sweetly as any thrush could sing in June. If
he had been trying to thank us, he could not
have done it more gracefully.

The worse the weather, the better we enjoyed
the birds’ society; and the better, in general,
they seemed to appreciate our efforts on their
behalf. It was noticeable, however, that chicka-
dees were with us comparatively little during

‘high, cold winds. On the 18th of February, for

92 EVERYDAY BIRDS

example, we had a blizzard, with driving snow,
the most inclement day of the winter. At seven
o'clock, when I looked out, four downy wood-
peckers were in the elm, all trying their best to
eat, though the branches shook till it was hard
work to hold on. They stayed much of the
forenoon. At ten o’clock, when the storm
showed signs of abating, though it was still wild
enough, a chickadee made his appearance and
whistled Phebe again and again—“a long
time,” my note says—3in his cheeriest manner.
Who can help loving a bird so courageous, “ so
frolic, stout, and self-possest”? Emerson did
well to call him a “ scrap of valor.” Yet I find
from a later note that “there were nothing like
the usual number of chickadees so long as the
fury lasted.” Doubtless most of them stayed
among the evergreens. It is an old saying of
the chickadee’s, frequently quoted, “ Be bold,
be bold, but not too bold.” On the same day I
saw a member of the household snowballing an
English sparrow away from one branch, while
a downy woodpecker continued to feed upon the
next one. The woodpecker had got the right
idea of things. Honest folk need not fear the
constable.

XX
WATCHING THE PROCESSION

Tr begins to go by my door about the first of
March, and is three full months in passing. The
participants are all in uniform, each after his
kind, some in the brightest of colors, some in
Quakerish grays and browns. They seem not to
stand very strictly upon the order of their com-
ing; red-coats and blue-coats travel side by side.
Like the flowers, they have a calendar of their
own, and in their own way are punctual, but
their movements are not to be predicted with
anything like mathematical nicety. Of some
companies of them I am never certain which will
precede the other, just as I can never tell
whether, in a particular season, the anemone or
the five-finger will come first into bloom. They
need no bands of music, no drum-corps nor fifers.
The whole procession, indeed, is itself a band of
music, a grand army of singers and players on
instruments. They sing many tunes; each uni-
form has a tune of its own, but, unlike what

94 EVERYDAY BIRDS

happens in military and masonic parades, there
is never any jangling, no matter how near to-
gether the different bands may be marching.

As I said, the pageant lasts for three months.
It is fortunate for me, perhaps, that it lasts no
longer; for the truth is, 1 have grown so fond
of watching it that I find it hard to attend to
my daily work so long as the show continues.
If I go inside for half a day, to read or to write,
T am all the time thinking of what is going on
outside. Who knows what I may be missing at
this very minute? I keep by me a prospectus
of the festival, a list of all who are expected to
take part in it, and, like most watchers of such
parades, I have my personal favorites for whom
I am always on the lookout. One thing troubles
me: there is never a year that I do not miss a
good many (a bad many, I feel like saying) of
those whose names appear in the announcements.
Some of them, indeed, I have never seen. If
they are really in the ranks, it must be that their
numbers are very small; for the printed pro-
gramme tells exactly how they will be dressed,
and I am sure I should recognize them if they
came within sight. Some of them, I fancy, do
not keep their engagements.

I spoke, to begin with, of their passing my
door. But I spoke figuratively. Some, it is

WATCHING THE PROCESSION 95

true, do pass my door, and even tarry for a day
or two under my windows, but to see others I
have to go into the woods. Some I find only in
deep, almost impenetrable swamps, dodging in
and out among thick bushes and cat-tails. A
good many follow the coast. I watch them run-
ning along the sea-beach on the edge of the surf,
or walking sedately over muddy flats where I
need rubber boots in which to follow them.
Some are silent during the day, but as darkness
comes on indulge in music and queer aerial
dancing.

Many travel altogether by night, resting and
feeding in the daytime. It is pleasant to stand
out of doors in the evening, and hear them call-
ing to each other overhead as they hasten north-
ward ; for at this time of the year, I have forgot-
ten to say, they are always traveling in a northerly
direction.

The procession, as such, has no definite ter-
minus. It breaks up gradually by the dropping
out of its members here and there. Each of
them knows pretty well where he is going. This
one, who came perhaps from Cuba, means to stop
in Massachusetts; that one, after a winter in
Central America, has in view a certain swamp or
meadow, or, it may be, some mountain-top, in
New Hampshire ; another will not be at home till

96 EVERYDAY BIRDS

he reaches the furthermost coast of Labrador or
the banks of the Saskatchewan. The prospectus
of which I spoke, and of which every reader
ought to have a copy, tells, in a general way,
whither each company is bound, but the members
of the same company often scatter themselves
over several degrees of latitude.

Some of the companies move compactly, and
are only two or three days, more or less, in pass-
ing a given point. You must be in the woods,
for example, on the 12th or 13th of May, or you
will miss them altogether. Others straggle along
for a whole month. You begin to think, perhaps,
that they mean to stay with you all summer, but
some morning you wake up to the fact that the
last one has gone.

It is curious how few people see this army of
travelers. They pass by thousands and hundreds
of thousands. More than a hundred different
companies go through every town in Massa-
chusetts between March 1 and June 1. They
dress gayly —not a few of them seem to have
borrowed Joseph’s coat — and are full of music,
yet somehow their advent excites little remark.
Perhaps it is because, for the most part, they flit
from bush to bush and from tree to tree, here
one and there one. If some year they should
form in line, and move in close order along the

WATCHING THE PROCESSION 97

public streets, what a stir they would excite! For
a day or two the newspapers would be full of
the sensation, and possibly the baseball reporters
would be compelled for once to shorten their ac-
counts of Battum’s “ wonderful left-hand catch ”
and Ketchum’s “ phenomenal slide to the second
base.” It is just as well, I dare say, that nothing
of this kind should ever happen, for it is hard to
see how the great reading public could bear even
the temporary loss of such interesting and instruc-
tive narratives.

Meantime, though the greater part of the peo-
ple pay no heed to these “birds of passage,”
some of us are never tired of watching them. I
myself used to be fond of gazing at military and
political parades. In my time I have seen a good
many real soldiers and a good many make-believes.
But as age comes on, I find myself, rightly or
wrongly, caring less and less for such spectacles.
Tt will never be so, I think, with the procession
of which I am now writing. I have never watched
it with more enthusiasm than this very year. It
is only just over, but I am already beginning
to count upon its autumnal return, and by the
middle of August shall be looking every day for
its advance couriers.

Till then I shall please myself with observing
the ways of such of the host as have happened

98 EVERYDAY BIRDS

to drop out of the procession in my immediate
neighborhood. One of them I can hear singing
at this very moment. He and his wife spent the
winter in Mexico, as well as I can determine, and
have been back with us since the 11th of May.
They have pitched their tent for the summer in
the top of a tall elm directly in front of my door,
and just now are much occupied with household
cares. The little husband (Vireo gilvus he is
called in the official programme, but I have heard
him spoken of, not inappropriately, as the war-
bling vireo) takes upon himself his full share of
the family drudgery, and it is very pretty indeed
to see him sitting in the tent and singing at his
work. He sets us all, as I think, an excellent
example.

XXI
SOUTHWARD BOUND

WuHie walking through a piece of pine wood,
three or four days ago, I was delighted to put
my eye unexpectedly upon a hummingbird’s nest.
The fairy structure was placed squarely upon the
upper surface of a naked, horizontal branch, and
looked so fresh, trimmed. outwardly with bits of
gray lichen, that I felt sure it must have been
built this year. But where now were the birds
that built it, and the nestlings that were hatched
in it? Who could tell? In imagination I saw the
mother sitting upon the tiny, snow-white eggs,
and then upon the two little ones — little ones,
indeed, no bigger than bumble-bees at first. I
saw her feeding them day by day, as they grew
larger and larger, till at last the cradle was get-
ting too narrow for them, and they were ready to
make a trial of their wings. But where were they
now? Not here, certainly. For a fortnight I had
been passing down this path almost daily, and
not once had I seen a hummingbird.

¥

100 EVERYDAY BIRDS

No, they are not here, and even as I write I
seem to see the little family on their way to the
far south. They are making the journey by easy
stages, I hope— flitting from flower-bed to flower-
bed, now in Connecticut, now in New Jersey, and
so on through Pennsylvania and the Southern
States. Will they cross the water to the West
Indies, as some of their kind are said to do ? or,
less adventurous, will they keep straight on to
some mountain-side in Costa Rica, or even in
Brazil? I should be sorry to believe that the
parent birds took their departure first, leaving
the twin children to find their way after them as
best. they could —as those who have paid most
attention to such matters assure us that many of
our birds are in the habit of domg. But how-
ever they go, and wherever they end their long
journey, may wind and weather be favorable, and
old and young alike return, after the winter is
over, to build other nests here in their native
New England.

This passing of birds back and forth, a grand
semi-annual tide, is to me a thing of wonder. I
think of the millions of sandpipers and plovers
which for two months (it is now late in Septem-
ber) have been pouring southward along the sea-
coast. Some of them passed here on their way
north no longer ago than the last days of May.

SOUTHWARD BOUND 101

They went far up toward the Arctic circle, but
before the end of July they were back again,
hastening to the equator. The golden plover,
we are told, travels from Greenland to Pata-
gonia.

All summer the golden warblers were singing
within sound of my windows. As I walked I saw
them flitting in and out of the roadside bushes,
beautiful and delicate creatures. But before the
first of September the last of them disappeared.
I did not see them depart. They took wing in
the night, and almost before I suspected it they
were gone. They will winter in Central or South
America, and, within a week of May-day, we shall
have them here again, as much at home as if they
had never left us.

They were gone before the first of September,
I said. But I was thinking of those which had
summered in Massachusetts. In point of fact, I
saw a golden warbler only ten days ago. He was
with a mixed flock of travelers, and, in all like-
lihood, had come from the extreme north; for
this dainty, blue-eyed warbler is common in sum-
mer, not only throughout the greater part of the
United States, but on the very shores of the Arc-
tic Ocean. So he voyages back and forth, living
his life from land to land, as Tennyson says, led
by who knows what impulse ?

102 EVERYDAY BIRDS

“‘ Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear ;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year.”

It is worth giving a little time daily to what is
called ornithology to be able to greet such wan-
derers as they come and go. For some days now
a few Western palm warblers have been paying
us a visit, and, though the town has never com-
missioned me to that office, I have taken it upon
myself to do them the honors. They have met
me halfway, at least, as the everyday expression
is; yielding readily to my enticements, and more
than once coming near enough to show me their
white lower eyelids, so that I might be quite sure
of their identity. A little later the Hastern palm
warbler will be due, and I hope to find him equally
complaisant ; for I wish to see his lower eyelid,
also, which is yellow instead of white.

At this time of the year, indeed, there is no
lack of such interesting and well-dressed stran-
gers, no matter where we may go. The woods
are alive with them by day, and the air by night.
There are few evenings when you may not hear
them calling overhead as they hasten southward.
Men who have watched them through telescopes,
pointed at the full moon, have calculated their
height at one or two miles. One observer saw

SOUTHWARD BOUND 103

more than two hundred cross the moon’s disk in
two hours. The greater part passed so swiftly as
to make it impossible to say more than that they
were birds; but others, flying at a greater alti-
tude, and therefore traversing the field of vision
less rapidly, were identified as blackbirds, rails,
snipe, and ducks. Another observer plainly
recognized swallows, warblers, goldfinches, and
woodpeckers.

All over the northern hemisphere to-night, in
America, Europe, and Asia, countless multitudes
of these wayfarers will be coursing the regions of
the upper air; and to-morrow, if we go out with
our eyes open, we shall find, here and there, busy
little flocks of stragglers that have stopped by
the way to rest and feed: sparrows, snowbirds,
kinglets, nuthatches, chickadees, thrushes, war-
blers, wrens, and what not, a few of them singing,
and every one of them evidently in love with life,
and full of happy expectations.

INDEX

Bittern: —

American, 68.

least, 78.
Blackbird, red-winged, 86.
Bluebird, 44, 59, 83.
Bob White, 85.
Bobolink, 86.
Butcher-bird, 19, 86.

Catbird, 86.

Cedar-bird, 84.

Chickadee, 7, 12, 83, 88, 91,
92.

Chimney swift, 56, 63.

Creeper, brown, 10, 91.

Crossbill, white-winged, 87.

Crow, 44, 49, 83.

Flicker, 64, 84.
Goldfinch, 84.
Grosbeak : —
cardinal, 25.
rose-breasted, 36, 40.
Grouse, 85.

Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 51,
63, 84, 99.

Indigo-bird, 86.

Jay, blue, 43, 83, 90.

Kingbird, 47, 85.

Kinglet : —
golden-crowned, 1, 91.
ruby-crowned, 1.

Migration, 93, 99.
Mockingbird, 16.

Nighthawk, 60.

Nuthatch : —
red-breasted, 90.
white-breasted, 88, 89.

Oriole, Baltimore, 83.

Partridge, 85.
Plover, golden, 101.
Plovers, 100.
Purple finch, 36, 37.

Redpoll linnet, 87.
Robin, 83.

Sandpipers, 100.

Shrike : — .
great northern, 19, 86.
loggerhead, 21.

Snipe, 61.
Snowbird (junco), 36, 59, 86.
Sparrow : —
chipping, 30, 31.
English, 30, 92.

106 INDEX

field, 30, 32, 36, 37. Vireo, warbling, 98.
fox, 36, 37. Vireos, 84.
Ipswich, 38. Vulture, California, 1, 4.

savanna, 26, 38.
song, 26, 36, 37, 39, 83. Warbler : —

tree, 36, 37, 38. golden, 101.
vesper, 26, 36, 37, 39. palm, 102.
white-throated, 36, 37, 38. | Warblers, 84.
Swift, chimney, 56, 63. Waxwing, cedar, 84.
Whip-poor-will, 60.
Tanager : — Woodcock, 61.
scarlet, 22, 85. Woodpecker : —
southern, 25. downy, 89, 92.

Thrasher, brown, 15, 86. golden-winged, 64, 84.

Che Riverside Press
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A.