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 EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies. 
 With twelve colored Illustrations repro- 
 duced from Audubon. Square i2mo, $i.qo. 
 
 BIRDS IN THE BUSH. i6mo, Ji.zs. 
 
 A RAMBLER'S LEASE. i6mo, $1.25. 
 
 THE FOOT-PATH WAY. i6mo, gilt top, 
 ?i.2S. 
 
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 i6mo, $1.25. 
 
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 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 Boston and New York. 
 
BLUE JAY 
 
 . Male. ^, ,'. Females 
 
EVERYDAY BIRDS 
 
 ELEMENTARY STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 BRADFOED TORREY 
 
 WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN 
 
 COLORS AFTER AUDUBON, AND 
 
 TWO FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW TOKK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANT 
 
 1901 
 
El 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRADFORD TORREY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Fage 
 
 I. Two Little Kings 1 
 
 II. The Chickadee 7 
 
 III. The Brown Creeper 10 
 
 IV. The Brown Thrasher 15 
 
 V. The Butcher-bird 19 
 
 VI. The Scarlet Tanager 22 
 
 VII. The Song Sparrow 26 
 
 VIII. The Field Sparrow and the Chipper . 30 
 
 IX. Some April Sparrows 35 
 
 X. The Rose-breasted Grosbeak ... 40 
 
 XI. The Blue Jay 43 
 
 XII. The Kingbird 47 
 
 XIII. The Hummingbird 51 
 
 XIV. The Chimney Swift 56 
 
 XV. Nighthawk and Whip-poor-will . . .59 
 
 XVI. The Flicker 64 
 
 XVII. The Bittern 68 
 
 XVIII. Birds for Everybody 82 
 
 XIX. Winter Pensioners 87 
 
 XX. Watching the Procession .... 93 
 
 XXI. Southward Bound 99 
 
 Index 105 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Paoi 
 
 Blue Jay . . . . . (page 43) Frontispiece 
 
 Golden-crowned Kinglet 2 
 
 Chickadee 8 
 
 Brown Creeper 12 
 
 Brown Thrasher 16 
 
 Scarlet Tanager 22 
 
 Song Sparrow 26 
 
 EOBE-BREASTED GrOSBEAK 40 
 
 Ruby-throated Hummingbird 52 
 
 NiGHTHAWK . . ■ 60 
 
 Whip-poor-will 62 
 
 Flicker 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 
 
 TWO LITTLE KINGS 
 
 The 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 " Eegulus," and 
 in Enghsh " 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. K 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- 
 
GOLDEN-CRO\VNED KINGLET 
 / , iilale. a. Feutaie 
 
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. Ovjer 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 
 hitn, whether or no. Every such new acquaint- 
 ance that a man makes is a new source of Hfe- 
 long happiness. 
 
 The enormous CaUfornia 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 6 
 
 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 beheve ; 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 in a 
 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 EVEKYDAY 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, tiU 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 
 Phoebe, — 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 whistHng 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 wUl 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 
 I. Male. a. 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 
 o£ 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." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE BKOWN 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 haK 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 wOl 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 
 wiU 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 
 
 The 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 ahke 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 reaUy 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 ofE 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 BTJTCHER-BIED 
 
 " Btjtohbr-bikd " 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 wiU 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 yery well, but his commonest seat is 
 the very tip of a taUish 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 aHght 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 hirgr 
 self . I had once stopped to look at a flicker in a 
 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 SCABLET TANAGER 
 
 When 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 o£ them, I put my opera-glass on 
 two o£ 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 Kttle longer than 
 a bluebird, of a superb scarlet color except for 
 its wings and tail, which, as I have said, are jet- 
 black. I speak of the male in full spring costume. 
 His mate does not show so much as a red feather, 
 but is greenish yeUow, 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 Uke 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 i£ 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 wiU 
 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 hving 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 is a 
 surprisingly loose, carelessly constructed thing, 
 through the bottom of which one can see the 
 blue or bluish eggs while standing on the ground 
 underneath. 
 
 It 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 
 t. 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 do no 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 wiU 
 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 wiU in turn drop 
 for a third, and so on. The bird acts, for all the 
 world, as i£ 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 dazzhng 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 vegetahle 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 pecuUar. 
 
 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 Uve 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. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE FIELD SPAKEOW AND THE CHIPPBK 
 
 All 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 sa,ys 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 hterally a small umbra, 
 or shade. 
 
 With most readers of this book the chipping 
 sparrow is a bird of spring, smnmer, 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 cMppy-chippy-chippy, 
 uttered so fast as to sound almost like a trill. 
 You may like the bird ne^er 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, vdth 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 hkely 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, WiUiam, 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, simpUcity, 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 or a Kttle higher. Really the strain 
 is almost too simple to make a description of : a 
 
34 EVERYDAY BIRDS 
 
 simple Kne 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 APKIL 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 aU 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 preem- 
 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 famiHar 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 the sparrows — 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, peahody. 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 EOSE-BEEASTED GROSBEAK 
 
 Theee 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 be 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 KOSE-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 hie, 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 taU 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 BLUB 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 undern'eath — and wearing a tall 
 crest or topknot. Then I know that they have 
 mistaken a blue hird for a 6Zt/ebird. 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 feU 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 Hsten 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 o£ 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 " fuU 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 whicH 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 Tvill 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 Enghsh 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. I 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 vrill 
 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 smaU dogwood bush, 
 aU eating greedily. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE HUMMINGBIRD 
 
 HuMMiiirGBiRDS 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 hves 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 a hummer. 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 of a 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 hke 
 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 clea;n 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 BIKDS 
 
 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 waUed 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 65 
 
 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 
 
 EvEEY 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, cackHng 
 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 
 
68 EVERYDAY BIRDS 
 
 same time the excitement of the flock increases. 
 Again and again the hirds 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 aUght 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 Hmb, 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-POOK-WILL 
 
 Rustic people are a Kttle 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 hfe. He Ks- 
 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." 
 
 Yerily, 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, " are n'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'si 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 aU 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 hstener 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 quaHty, 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 PubUc 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 Uke a stone almost to the 
 ground. At the last moment it arrests itself sud- 
 denly, and then is heard a very pecuUar " 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 trembhng. 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 Kke 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 
 httle 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 rehance to be placed upon outside 
 show, or what scientific men call " external 
 characters." We might as well say that th^ 
 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 
 
 The 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 yeUow 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 
 /. Maie. 2. Fevinles 
 
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, " 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 caUed 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 EVEKYDAY 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 
 efEort 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 aU 
 times a loud, unmusical yawp, — a signal, I sup- 
 pose, — and in the mating season especially he 
 utters a very affectionate, conversational wicker 
 ov 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 mUd, 
 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 
 win rear a brood under the orchard-owner's nose 
 without betraying Mmself. 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. 
 
xvn 
 
 THE BITTERN 
 
 It 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, especially 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 BITTEKN 69 
 
 and were hardly seated on the edge o£ the 
 meadow, facing the beautiful Nobscot HiU, 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 : " I 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 b^og, 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 hke 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 wiU 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 Hkely, 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 of tenest 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 sufEering 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 BITTEKN 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 o£ 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 77 
 
 The boy evidently took us for a pair of igno- 
 ramuses from the city. 
 
 " I 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 unenlightene^d. 
 
 Not all Wayland people are thus poorly in- 
 formed, however, and we shortly learned, to our 
 considerable satisfaction, that they have a most 
 feUcitous local name for the bird. They call 
 him " plum-pudd'n'," which is exactly what he 
 himseH says, only that his u is in both words 
 somewhat long, like the vowel in "full." To 
 get the true efEect 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 tlje 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 famiUar to all naturahsts, 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 clifE 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 year 
 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. 
 
 It was curious, and illustrated strikingly the 
 utihty 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 rephed, " 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. 
 
xvin 
 
 BIRDS FOE EVBBYBODY 
 
 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 stiU 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 say 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 it is 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 
 robio, 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 wiU 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, hterally, 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 shght 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 
 famihar 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. Eeally 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 
 ahghts on the outer sill, notices the open win- 
 dow, scolds a little (the thing looks like a trap — 
 at aU 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 
 Ught 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 1 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 aU 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, 
 calKng 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 inefEectively 
 frowned upon (they carry off too much at once), 
 we had last winter, for all the latter half of it, a 
 pair of red-beUied 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 Kttle to say, and 
 perhaps found scftips 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 
 aU the trouble which the experiment cost us to 
 lie 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 efBorts 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 stiU wild 
 enough, a chickadee made his appearance and 
 whistled Phoebe again and again — "a long 
 time," my note says — in his cheeriest manner. 
 Who can help loving a bird so courageous, " so 
 froUc, 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 snowbaUing 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 
 
 It 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, nq drum-corps nor fif ers. 
 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 jangUng, 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, I 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, 
 I am aU 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 had 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 wiU 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 tei^ 
 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. 
 It 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 taU 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 
 
 SOUTHWAED BOUND 
 
 While walking through a piece of pine wood, 
 three or four days ago, I was deUghted 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. WiU they cross the water to the West 
 Indies, as some of their hind 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 doing. 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 bmld 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 milUons 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 sununer 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 dehcate 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 
 as a visit, and, though the town has never com- 
 missioned me to that ofi&ce, 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 eyeUds, so that I might be quite sure 
 of their identity. A little later the Eastern palm 
 warbler will be due, and I hope to find him equally 
 complaisant ; for I wish to see his lower eyehd, 
 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 : — 
 
 Kingbird, 47, 85. 
 
 ATnerican, 68. 
 
 Kinglet : — 
 
 least, 78. 
 
 golden-crowned, 1, 91 
 
 Blacktird, red-winged, 86. 
 
 ruby-crowned, 1. 
 
 Bluebird, 44, 59, 83. 
 
 
 Bob White, 85. 
 
 Migration, 93, 99. 
 
 Bobolink, 86. 
 
 Mockingbird, 16. 
 
 Butcher-bird, 19, 86. 
 
 
 
 Nighthawk, 60. 
 
 Catbird, 86. 
 
 Nuthatch : — 
 
 Cedar-bird, 84. 
 
 red-breasted, 90. 
 
 Chickadee, 7, 12, 83, 88, 91, 
 
 92. 
 Chimney swift, 56, 63. 
 
 white-breasted, 88, 89 
 
 Oriole, Baltimore, 83. 
 
 Creeper, brown, 10, 91. 
 
 
 Crossbill, white-winged, 87. 
 
 Partaidge, 85. 
 
 Crow, 44, 49, 83. 
 
 Plover, golden, 101. 
 
 
 Plovers, 100. 
 
 FUeker, 64, 84. 
 
 Purple finch, 36, 37. 
 
 Goldfinch, 84. 
 
 Redpoll linnet, 87. 
 
 Grosbeak : — 
 
 Robin, 83. 
 
 cardinal, 25. 
 
 
 rose-breasted, 36, 40. 
 
 Sandpipers, 100. 
 
 Grouse, 85. 
 
 Shrike : — 
 
 
 great northern, 19, 86 
 
 Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 51, 
 
 loggerhead, 21. 
 
 63, 84, 99. 
 
 Snipe, 61. 
 
 
 Snowbird (junoo), 36, 59, 86 
 
 Indigo-bird, 86. 
 
 Sparrow : — 
 
 
 chipping, 30, 31. 
 
 Jay, blue, 43, 83, 90. 
 
 English, 80, 92. 
 
106 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Held, 30, 32, 36, 37. 
 fox, 36, 37. 
 Ipswich, 38. 
 saTanna, 26, 38. 
 song, 26, 36, 37, 39, 83. 
 tree, 36, 37, 38. 
 vesper, 26, 36, 37, 39. 
 white-throated, 36, 37, 38. 
 S\jift, chimney, 56, 63. 
 
 Tanager : — 
 
 scarlet, 22, 85. 
 
 southern, 25. 
 Thrasher, brown, 15, 86. 
 
 Vireo, warbling, 98. 
 
 Vireos, 84. 
 
 Vulture, California, 1, 4. 
 
 Warbler : — 
 
 golden, 101. 
 
 palm, 102. 
 Warblers, 84. 
 Waxwing, cedar, 84. 
 Whip-poor-wiU, 60. 
 Woodcock, 61. 
 Woodpecker : — 
 
 downy, 89, 92. 
 
 golden-winged, 64, 84. 
 
ElectrotyPed and printed by H, O. Houghton &* Co, 
 Cambridge t Mass.^ U.S. A,