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Updated: May 15, 2025
I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills; and whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in mid-winter to eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities of birds.
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.
The kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
It is seriously to the discredit of Mississippi that her laws actually classify robins, cedar-birds, grosbeaks and doves as "game," and make them killable as such from Sept. 1 to March 1! I should think that if no economic consideration carried weight in Mississippi, state pride alone would be sufficient to promote a correction of the evil.
Behind this ridge for several miles the country is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the home of many wild swarms of bees. What a gleeful uproar the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes, and cow black-birds make amid the black cherry-trees as we pass along. The raccoons, too, have been here after black cherries, and we see their marks at various points.
Little they knew of the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest." Adam and Eve, in Paradise, were never more happy. A few weeks later, taking an evening walk, I was stopped by the sight of a pair of cedar-birds on a stone wall. They had chosen a convenient flat stone, and were hopping about upon it, pausing every moment or two to put their little bills together.
I see bunches of robins and cedar-birds also, so much melody and beauty cut off from the supply going north. The fish-market is beginning to be bright with perch and bass, and with shad from the Southern rivers, and wild ducks are taking the place of prairie hens and quails. In the Carolinas, no doubt, the fruit trees are in bloom, and the rice land is being prepared for the seed.
Yan would rather have had Sam along, but that couldn't be, and Peetweet proved a good fellow, though rather slow. They soon left the high ground and came to the bog flat and seemingly endless and with a few tall Tamaracks. There were some Cedar-birds catching Flies on the tall tree-tops, and a single Flycatcher was calling out: "Whoit whoit whoit!"
"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.
Then there is the never-failing crop of birds, robins, goldfinches, kingbirds, cedar-birds, hairbirds, orioles, starlings, all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether the pippin and sweet bough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always be depended on.
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