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Updated: May 21, 2025
The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows, crows, all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring. The cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel blooms. The trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is humid, and the moisture rises in the ground.
For instance, my little wood thrushes, as soon as they reached a sufficient age, called just like their relatives of the sylvan solitudes; my brown thrashers uttered the labial chirp of the species; my red-winged blackbird exclaimed "Chack! chack!" after the manner of his kind; my bluebirds expressed their feelings in the sad little purr of Sialia sialis; my flickers did not borrow the calls of the red-heads, but each clung to its own language; my catbirds mewed like poor pussy in trouble; and so on through the whole list.
Distant redwings gave their celebrated imitation of a great multitude. Bluebirds warbled on the wing. The busier chickadees and creepers searched the twigs and trunks, interpolating occasional remarks. The sun slanted through the forest. Bob strode on vigorously.
The sunshine that elsewhere looks thin and pale drops warmly here into back yards and ripples ever so brightly up and down Rabbit's Hill, where the hedges are turning green and David Allan is plowing. The willows back of Dell Parsons' house are budding and all aquiver with the wildly glad, full-throated warblings of robins, bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds and bobolinks.
"What birds will you tell us about to-night?" asked Dodo, as they stood in the porch waiting for the boys. "Cousins of the Bluebird more cousins but really the heads of the Silver-tongued Family. They wear much plainer clothes than the Bluebirds and Robins, on their olive or russet-brown backs and light-tinted, dark-spotted breasts, but have the most beautiful voices in all Birdland.
Had I stumbled upon a regular route of swallow migration? It looked so, surely; but I made little account of the matter till a month afterward, when, in exactly the same place, I observed robins and bluebirds following the same course. The robins were seen October 26th, in four flocks, succeeding each other at intervals of a few minutes, and numbering in all about 130 birds.
I heard the notes of warning and alarm and approached to within eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered about uttering their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were bolder and took turns looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor shrinking owl.
I have known a pair of bluebirds to brave them on such poor rations as are afforded by the hardhack or sugarberry, a drupe the size of a small pea, with a thin, sweet skin. Probably hardly one per cent. of the drupe is digestible food. Bluebirds in December will also eat the berries of the poison ivy, as will the downy woodpecker.
They stayed a few moments and then slowly hopped away and were lost among the tree trunks. A further search only frightened a prairie chicken from beneath a hawthorne bush, where he had meant to pass the night; and the bluebirds were not seen again. But the sight of bluebirds in Iowa on the nineteenth day of February is glory enough for one day.
We laughed at her cudbar petticoats, her little "chopped hands;" and when she stumbled over the arithmetic lesson, because she had been up at four o'clock every morning since the first bluebirds came, we laughed at that. Life in general seems to have treated Polly in somewhat the same way.
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