United States or Bouvet Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In this case, certainly, the jay was no more offensive than the meekest bird that has a nest to defend, and far less belligerent than robins and many others. On one occasion a strange blue jay flew up to the nest in the pine.
I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the robins, too, had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring.
At any rate they are able to flutter back into the bush where their old nest is, not that they ever expect to get back in their nest. They would no more try to do that than a great big grown-up man would want to get back in the little cradle in which his mother had rocked him when he was a baby." The biography of the robins was finished just as Dr.
Tiny pools stood in the ruts glinting blue toward the sky. The old horse plodded slowly on and the robins called among the elms that stood arching over white farm-houses with blinds, some blue, some green. With a harrowing sense of helplessness, the realization of what I had thrown away of life swept over me. I turned from the sodden creature beside me in disgust.
And the tulips, those dear liliaceous plants so dear to the Flemish heart, what emotion they must have caused to their zealous cultivators! The worthy Van Bistrom nearly fell over backwards, one day, on seeing in his garden an enormous "Tulipa gesneriana," a gigantic monster, whose cup afforded space to a nest for a whole family of robins!
The pines were scrubby, what are known as the loblolly pines, and from ten to twelve inches through at the butt. In a low bottom, among some red cedars, I saw robins and several hermit thrushes, besides the yellow-rumped warbler. That night, as the sun went down on the one hand, the full moon rose up on the other, like the opposite side of an enormous scale.
It was a cherry pit which one of the baby robins had "popped." "Was that a nut which fell from the big basswood?" asked Gabriel Chipmunk.
When the snow thawed, spring appeared so suddenly that it looked as if it had lain there all winter in a green and gold powder over the meadows. Flashes of blue, like bits of fallen sky, showed from the rail fences; and the notes of robins fluted up from the budding willows beside the brook.
The quivering ecstasy of spring, the mating calls of robins and orioles, the rushing joy of bursting blossoms, the delicate perfume of violets and trailing arbutus, the dazzling shafts of sunlight pierced by silver showers of capricious April all echoed in the melody of the violin. "You are like that, that is you!" he said as he laid his instrument aside. His words were very sweet to me.
Two robins sang exultantly in the higher branches of the oak, where they had breakfasted satisfyingly upon the first of the little, green worms that gave early promise of being a pest until such time as they stiffened and clung inertly, waiting for the dainty, gray wings to grow and set them aflutter over the tree upon which they had fed.
Word Of The Day