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Dainty green warblers nest in its tree-tops, and red-eyed vireos choose a location below. It is the home of bell-birds, finches, and thrushes. There are flocks of blackbirds, grackles, and crows. Jays and catbirds quarrel constantly, and marsh-wrens keep up never-ending chatter. Orioles swing their pendent purses from the branches, and with the tanagers picnic on mulberries and insects.
Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well as of the old.
The robins were yelling from the trees and the sparrows bickering under them; catbirds were calling from the thickets of syringa, and in the nearest woods a hermit-thrush was ringing its crystal bells. The clear day was penetrating the east with the subtle light which precedes the sun, and a summer sweetness rose cool from the garden below, gray with dew.
A friend told me of a small party of blue jays that she saw playing this kind of a joke on a flock of birds of several kinds, robins, catbirds, thrashers, and others. These birds were gathering the cherries on the top branches of a big cherry tree. The jays sat quietly on another tree till the cherry eaters were very busy eating.
In every way they were a violent contrast to all their neighbors, the boisterous blue jays, lively catbirds, blustering robins, and vulgar-mannered blackbirds.
The Thrashers, and Catbirds too, were quite silent and invisible; of all the voices that had made the last three months so musical, the Red-eyed Vireo and the Song Sparrow alone persisted in singing, aided by a few Wood Thrushes. "Rap says that August is a poor month for birds about here," said Nat to his uncle; "do you think there will be more of them down at the shore?"
The Cardinal was hatched in a thicket of sweetbrier and blackberry. His father was a tough old widower of many experiences and variable temper. He was the biggest, most aggressive redbird in the Limberlost, and easily reigned king of his kind. Catbirds, king-birds, and shrikes gave him a wide berth, and not even the ever-quarrelsome jays plucked up enough courage to antagonize him.
I am glad that even the stony and tumultuous city affords some opportunities for these amiable observations. In the month of April there is hardly a clump of shrubbery in the Central Park which will not serve as a trysting-place for yellow warblers and catbirds just home from their southern tours.
Nothing could be plainer than that he sings for the pure pleasure of it an artist deeply in love with his art. Falling a little behind the thrashers in vocal power and technical execution were the catbirds, which sent up their cavatinas from the bushes in the hollow. Their voices lacked the volume and strength of their rivals, yet some of their strains were truly the quintessence of sweetness.
Straightway, what must have been a cave swallow becomes a barn swallow; the haunter of rock ledges changes to an eave swallow; the nest in the niche of the cliff is deserted and phoebe becomes a bridgebird; cedarbirds are renamed cherrybirds, and catbirds and other low-nesting species find the blackberry patch safer than the sweetbrier vine in the deep woods.
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