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Updated: July 19, 2025
It was my good fortune to find a nest on a copsy hilltop, where the bird's madrigals and lullabies mingled with those of the yellow-breasted chats, the indigo buntings, the blue-gray gnat catchers, and the Kentucky warblers. To this day I feel a longing to visit the secluded spot where I held so many pleasant interviews with these birds.
It is not many years since there were several such winter gardens of the birds in Commonwealth Avenue, vacant house-lots overgrown with tall weeds. Hither cause flocks of goldfinches, red-poll linnets, and snow buntings; and thither I went to watch them.
Our officers had their guns on deck, and amused themselves by shooting as many of the birds which came in their way as they could; but my messmates called them by the various names of shearwaters, boatswains, kittiwakes, dovekies, Mollymokes or Mollies, gulls, buntings, and many others, whose names I forget.
More abundant were the small birds in mixed flocks or hordes finches, buntings, and larks in thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied and grey wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh ploughed land.
The pressure of the bird population upon the means of support would then have been materially increased; and not only the Buntings, but the Warblers, Pipits, and all the rest would have suffered.
But even among birds that neither bore nor mine, but which build a shallow nest on the branch of a tree or upon the ground, as the robin, the finches, the buntings, etc., the ordure of the young is removed to a distance by the parent bird.
He delighted and dazzled her, though he did not disquiet her as he did me, perhaps because she, too, was young and beautiful, and I wasn't. It will be seen, then, that our position, take it by and large, wasn't one that called for flags and buntings. Life didn't look a bit rose-colored to me as I sat there that night, drafting a letter to the Head.
Presently, while I stood in front of my study looking at them, a larger and darker bird came swiftly by me, flying low and straight toward the buntings. He shot beneath the trellises, and evidently hoped to surprise the birds. It was a shrike, thirsting for blood or brains. But the buntings were on the alert, and were up in the air before the feathered assassin reached them.
No wonder the stream will be hidden from view next summer, when the myriad seeds sprout and begin to fight upward for light and air. If we cannot hope for polar bears to complete our Arctic scene, we may thrill at the sight of a sinuous weasel, winding his way among the weeds; and if we look in vain for swans, we at least may rejoice in a whirling, white flock of snow buntings.
We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling from the grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their small merry music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats that shift their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and of the cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the splendid bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds as we climb the rocky hill toward the north.
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