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Updated: May 19, 2025
"Come sta?" said some one in the doorway. And there stood Luigi, having deposited his tray of images on the steps, holding up a long string of birds'-eggs blown, tiny varicolored globes plundered from the thrushes, bobolinks, blue-jays, and cedar-birds, and trembling upon the thread as if their concrete melody quivered to open into tune.
Something that had called to his father and to his grandfather and to all his ancestors, ever since bobolinks first flew from North America to South America once every year. How many ages this has been, who knows? Perhaps ever since the icy glaciers left Maine and made a chance for summer meadows there.
That day the following birds came aboard, all in an exhausted condition: Brown Creeper, Spotted Sandpiper, Green Heron, and Yellow-billed Cuckoo. We also encountered three flocks of Bobolinks, which for some distance flew beside the ship.
Besides, it was time for the Feast of the Vagabonds, a ceremony that must be performed during the first weeks of the Migrant Flight; for it is a custom of the bobolinks, come down to them through no one knows how many centuries, to hold a farewell feast before leaving North America. If you will glance at a map of the Bobolink Route, you will see the names of the states they passed through.
As I took my usual walk one evening, down the carriage drive to the gate, I found two pairs of bobolinks on one tree; the two mothers with food in their mouths, evidently intended for somebody down in the grass; and the two fathers, very much disturbed at my appearance.
We followed the ups and downs of the road for a mile, passing a meadow full of bobolinks, "Bubbling rapturously, madly," climbed by a grass-grown wood road a mountain-side pasture, and reached the forest. Under a dead spruce sat my lady, in a snug bed among the fallen leaves.
Blackbirds, which have now returned from the South, sing in chorus on the adjacent ditch-banks, mingling their harsh notes with the lively songs of myriads of bobolinks, while high overhead whistles the plover. The newly-sprung grass paints the road-side a lush green, the leaves are budding on weed and spray, and over all there hang the exhilarating influences of spring.
Thoreau himself, whom Lowell did not like, was not more veracious an observer than the author of "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," and "My Garden Acquaintance." Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners."
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.
Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature literature becomes a category.
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