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Updated: June 11, 2025
"You and him a-giggling make music like a nest full of young cat-birds. Did you ever notice how 'most any down-heart will get up and go a-marching to a laugh tune? I needed just them chuckles to set me up again." As she finished speaking Mother Mayberry seated herself on the top step and Miss Wingate slipped down beside her with the baby in her arms. "What is the trouble this morning, Mrs.
Birds of prey, you Dutch varlet! What do you think of the mistress of the manor? The serenading anti-renters have come for her." Then he repeated more slowly: "The squaw Pewasch! For seventeen and one-half ells of duffels! A rare principality for the scornful minx! Lord! how the birds sing now around the manor screech owls, cat-birds, bobolinks!"
In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land?
The vireo is hardly larger than the goldfinch, but let him be in one of his conversational moods, and he will fill a smilax thicket with noise enough for two or three cat-birds. Meanwhile he keeps his eye upon you, and seems to be inviting your attention to his loquacious abilities. The chat is perhaps even more voluble.
The oaks which he had planted shook out their glossy green in the morning gale, and in the tulip-trees, which had snowed their petals on the ground in wide circles defined by the reach of their branches, he heard the squirrels barking; a red-bird from the woody depths behind the house mocked the cat-birds in the quince-trees.
Among the smaller birds which do much good, but of which complaints are made because they eat some fruit and grain are the woodpeckers, including the flickers, cedar-birds, robins, cat-birds, thrashers, crows and blackbirds.
On the tops of the sweet old honeysuckles the cat-birds; robins in the low boughs of maples; on the high limb of the elm the silvery-throated lark, who had stopped as he passed from meadow to meadow; on a fence rail of the distant wheat-field the quail and many another. I walked to and fro, receiving the voice of each as a spear hurled at my body. The sun sank. The shadows rushed on and deepened.
The exciting problem was solved, and we turned our feet homeward over the hills, across the fields and by stone walls; shying a stone now and then into some gnarled apple tree, just to knock down a wild apple or two, to try if they contained, as Emerson has said of one of them, "a pint of cider and a barrel of wind"; whipping off the heads of the wild daisies with our canes and switches; pulling sprigs of sweet fern and bayberry; mocking the crows and the cat-birds; finding choice flowers, and trying to fill the aching void within us with blackberries and whortleberries, and reaching the farm after the dinner was over.
Dewdrops glistened on the ferns; ripples sparkled in the brooks; spider-webs glowed with wondrous rainbow hues, and the flower of the forest, the sweet, pale-faced daisy, rose above the green like a white star. Yellow birds flitted among the hazel bushes caroling joyously, and cat-birds sang gaily.
I became greatly attached to my beautiful bird, which appeared, in the presence of his wise and wary room-mates, cat-birds and thrushes, like a big, clumsy, but affectionate baby.
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