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Updated: June 3, 2025
"Many a May morning," she says, "have I wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many- colored warblers and flycatchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside, enough to break the heart of a small child to think of!
Before the stars had all gone to their hiding place and while the light of a few large planets was growing dim, fading into the clay, we were making our way down to the shore through dewy grass, azaleas, and various shrubs, where the swamp sparrows, robins, and catbirds were greeting the new day from their bushy coverts with their songs of gladness.
There were so many songs you couldn't decide which was which to save you; it was just a pouring jumble of robins, larks, doves, blackbirds, sparrows, everything that came that early; the red and the yellow birds had not come yet, or the catbirds or thrushes.
If anybody attempts to check him, sapristi! beware his gun! He cheerfully invades your fields, and even your lawn; and he shoots robins, bluebirds, thrushes, catbirds, grosbeaks, tanagers, orioles, woodpeckers, quail, snipe, ducks, crows, and herons.
I hurried downstairs, and as I appeared the jay flew, with two catbirds after him, still crying in a way I had never heard before. I expected nothing less than to find a young catbird injured, but I found nothing. Whether the blue jay really had touched one, or it was a mere false alarm on the part of the very excitable catbirds, I could not tell.
Without taking pains to look for them, one might see the nests of two catbirds, two wood doves, a robin or two, and others; and there were beside, thickets, the delight of many birds, and a row of spruces so close that a whole flock might have nested there in security.
In that spot "the quaintly discontinuous lays" of the catbird were in perfection; one song especially was the best I ever heard, being louder and more clear than catbirds usually sing. As I turned to leave the grounds, the relieved parent, who had not relished my interest in his little folk, mounted a branch, and,
The leaves swarmed with birds, robins and wrens and catbirds and all the feathered tribe keeping up an incessant quivering and trilling, while a distant woodpecker drummed portentously on the trunk of an old oak. They too saw the passing youths, but since no hand was raised to hurt them they sang, in their way, as they worked and played.
Meanwhiles, the buck Vanderbilt is drivin' the outfit all over an' 'round the cantonments, the entire bunch as sassy an' as flippant as a coop o' catbirds. It's all the Astors can do to keep from goin' plumb locoed. The Vanderbilts win. "One mornin', when Florer an' me has jest run our brands onto the fourth drink, an old buck comes trailin' into the store.
But, alas! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than twenty feet away, and these "giddy neighbors" had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watchful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than "To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots Came stealing."
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