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The first one to come near me was full of inquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly as chickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alight on my hat. "Let us have a look at this stranger," he appeared to be saying. Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it.
Towhees were calling noisily from wayside thickets; catbirds sang their self-conscious airs or mewed in derision as we passed; chickadees were calling their names and occasionally uttered their pensive minor strains; and far away in a dim- lighted hemlock grove we heard a new bird song that seemed in exquisite accord with our own thoughts. Again and again the notes came from the forest.
In the silence the birds began to reappear. A jay screamed somewhere deep in the yellowing woods; black-capped chickadees dropped from twig to twig, cheeping inquiringly.
Perhaps they thought me harmless, or that they had deceived me so well at first that I did not even suspect them of nest-building. Anyway, I never pretended I knew. As the afternoon wore away, and the sun dropped into the pine tops, the chickadees grew hungry, and left their work until the morrow.
In the dry wood at the bottom he makes a little round pocket and lines it with the very softest material. When one finds such a nest, with five or six white eggs delicately touched with pink lying at the bottom, and a pair of chickadees gliding about, half fearful, half trustful, it is altogether such a beautiful little spot that I know hardly a boy who would be mean enough to disturb it.
But not every encounter with him, I quickly learned, was a party. One morning Atmananda emerged from his cottage in Stony Brook carrying a thick stack of posters. Bluejays, doves, sparrows, and chickadees flocked around a feeder. Sal, Paul, my brother, and I stood nearby. Atmananda approached, but the little birds remained. "Ellaow," he said in a Cockney accent. "Ellaow," we echoed.
There were warblers, cardinals, tanagers, waxwings, song-sparrows, and chickadees. Flitting droves of bush-tit dropped on to slender weeds, scarcely bending them, so light were they. Then in a minute they were gone. In the swamps or marshes were countless red-winged blackbirds. The most unobservant person could not help but see birds here.
Wherever he went he could see the jolly chickadees scrambling merrily about, and he remembered the time when they had seemed such big, important creatures. They were the most absurdly cheerful things in the woods.
I have found chickadees and some of the smaller sparrows apparently frozen to death, but the extravasation of blood usual in such cases leaves us in doubt whether some accident may not have first disabled the bird; and if dead birds are more often found in winter than in summer, it may be only that the body keeps longer, and, from the absence of grass and leaves, and the white covering of the ground, is more readily seen.
Then the music stopped and Rap returned laughing, saying that when the Chickadee found out it was not another bird that he was calling to, he was vexed and flew away. "Some Chickadees lived around our house all last winter," continued Rap, "and used to eat out of the chickens' dish. I watched them every day but one that was terribly windy, and then they stayed under the miller's cow-shed.
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